EarthCube Data Capabilities: QGreenland: Enabling Science through GIS

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QGreenland will create an interdisciplinary GIS data environment that is freely available and ready-to-use on the open-source QGIS platform. Designed in direct response to requests from the research community and needs identified by international and U.S. agencies, QGreenland will provide immediate impact for scientific research and exploration. QGreenland will improve data sharing for research and enable cross-community system science to advance knowledge and collaboration. The project has broader impacts owing to the importance of Greenland in general for understanding and prediction global climate. Greenland sustains a massive amount of land ice, the future of which will significantly determine to what extent sea levels rise.QGreenland will address the limitations of current online GIS platforms and data services by providing a geoscience-focused but interdisciplinary package of professionally formatted data that is ready-to-use online or offline. QGreenland is modelled off of the widely used, award-winning Quantarctica package, an Antarctica GIS package developed by Project Collaborators at the Norwegian Polar Institute. Based on QGIS, a free, open-source, cross-platform GIS environment as the foundational software, QGreenland will offer a freely-redistributable package of original-quality data in a complete GIS environment. Three tiers of a data will be available, including web-served datasets. An international Editorial Board and diverse Project Collaborators will help the QGreenland Team identify key geospatial datasets and act as two-way connectors between QGreenland and user communities in the US, Greenland, and across the globe. QGreenland will provide a tool for visualization, individual GIS environment expansion, and to explore system science across geosciences, social sciences, and the built environment. QGreenland is also an instant in-field tool with a full set of reference data that can be used with no or limited internet access.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.