Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Abrupt Change in Climate and Ecosystems: Where are the Tipping Points?

将计算机科学和技术以及大型和复杂的数据集应用于跨学科和跨学科科学的能力正在显现。因此，至关重要的是要建立和启用跨国框架，使数据驱动的科学知识能够超越学科和地理边界，最终增强政策和行动的科学基础。全球环境变化研究领域的国际合作有可能为具有共享服务的联邦数据集成和分析系统建立国际基础，汇集公共和私营部门的最佳实践，在包括出版等相关领域的科学界中促进开放数据和开放科学管理，并鼓励数据和云提供商和其他人采用共同的标准和实践，造福所有人。该奖项支持美国研究人员参与由来自23个国家的29个资助机构组成的联盟通过贝尔蒙论坛竞争性选择的一个项目，该项目呼吁就科学驱动的电子基础设施创新(SEI)提出建议，以加强跨国、跨学科和跨学科数据在环境变化中的使用。SEI是一个多边倡议，旨在支持将环境、社会和经济科学家与数据科学家、计算科学家以及电子基础设施和网络基础设施开发商和提供者聚集在一起的研究项目，以解决目前跨学科和跨学科环境变化研究面临的一个或多个方法、技术和/或程序挑战，这些研究涉及使用大量、多样和多源的跨国数据。SEI号召将把研究思维和技术创新紧密联系在一起，加速发现驱动的数据使用和开放科学的全程，并使更广泛的科学界能够从确定的新的和潜在的颠覆性解决方案的示范者或试点中受益。历史记录表明，突然和意想不到的变化是常态，而不是例外，这些变化对许多物种和文明都有直接影响。来自自然和历史档案的长期记录对于识别这些关键因素至关重要，因为过去的突然变化发生得很快，但很少发生，因此无法用工具记录进行观察。解决和沟通可持续性研究中的这一重大挑战的关键限制是数据访问和不兼容。无法访问或“黑暗”的数据、非结构化数据、缺乏整合多国和多学科数据库和数据集的电子基础设施，这些都从根本上限制了我们对突然变化的理解。该项目由一个由生态学家、气候学家和信息学家组成的不同的国际联合体运营，将寻求建立电子基础设施，以便能够在跨学科和跨国数据资源之间高效地获取跨资源数据；并创建一个分析资料包，使用户能够探测、绘制地图和调查地球系统的突然变化。该项目将侧重于确定地球气候和生态系统中的关键因素，并了解6000年前是什么驱动了北非亚热带地区的快速荒漠化。此外，该项目将寻求建立公平数据原则的模型：1)可找到：暴露暗数据并开发数据发现工具。2)可访问：将暗数据传输到开放访问平台。3)可互操作：建立支持交叉访问的网络基础设施。和4)可重复使用：生成数据合成产品，确定基本元数据作为未来数据生成器的模型，同时与利益相关者合作，促进社区认可的数据标准的开发。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The capability to bring computer science and technology as well as large and complex data sets to bear on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary science is emerging. It is therefore critically important to establish and enable transnational frameworks so that data-driven scientific knowledge can transcend disciplines and geographical borders, ultimately increasing the scientific underpinnings of policy and action. International collaboration within global environmental change research fields holds the potential to establish international foundations for federated data integration and analysis systems with shared services, bring together best practices from the public and private sectors, foster open data and open science stewardship among the science communities including related areas such as publishing, and encourage data and cloud providers and others to adopt common standards and practices for the benefit of all.This award supports U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a coalition of 29 funding agencies from 23 countries through the Belmont Forum Call for proposals on Science-driven e-Infrastructure Innovation (SEI) for the Enhancement of Transnational, Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Data Use in Environmental Change. SEI is a multilateral initiative designed to support research projects that bring together environmental, social and economic scientists with data scientists, computational scientists, and e-infrastructure and cyber-infrastructure developers and providers to solve one or more of the methodological, technological and/or procedural challenges currently facing inter-disciplinary and transdisciplinary environmental change research that involves working with large, diverse and multi-source transnational data. The SEI call will intimately link research thinking and technological innovation toward accelerating the full-path of discovery-driven data use and open science and enable a broader scientific community to benefit from the identified new and potentially disruptive demonstrators or pilots toward solutions.The historical record indicates that abrupt and unexpected change is the norm, not the exception and that these changes have direct consequences for many species and civilizations. Long‐term records from natural and historical archives have been essential to identifying these tipping elements, because past abrupt changes have occurred rapidly but infrequently, making them impossible to observe with instrumental records. The key limitations to addressing and communicating this major challenge in sustainability research is data access and incompatibility. Inaccessible or "dark" data, unstructured data, the lack of e-infrastructure to integrate multinational and multidisciplinary databases and datasets, are fundamental limit our understanding of abrupt change. This project, run by a diverse, international consortium of ecologists, climate scientists and informaticists will seek to build e-infrastructure that enables efficient cross-resource data access between trans-disciplinary and transnational data resources; and create an analysis package that allows users to detect, map and investigate abrupt change in Earth systems. The project will focus on determining the tipping elements in Earth's climate and ecosystems and to understand what drove rapid desertification in subtropical North Africa 6,000 years ago. In addition, the project will seek to model the FAIR data principles: 1) Findable: exposing dark data and developing tools for data discovery. 2) Accessible: transferring dark data to open-access platforms. 3) Interoperable: building cyberinfrastructure that enables cross-access. And 4) reusable: generating data synthesis products that identify essential metadata as a model for future data generators, while working with stakeholders to facilitate the development of community endorsed data standards.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.