Collaborative Research: CIBR: Cyberinfrastructure Enabling End-to-End Workflows for Aquatic Ecosystem Forecasting

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Aquatic ecosystems in the United States and around the globe are experiencing increasing variability due to human activities. Provisioning drinking water in the face of rapid change in environmental conditions motivates the need to develop forecasts of future water quality. Near-term water quality forecasts can guide management actions over day to week time scales to mitigate potential disruptions in drinking water and other essential freshwater ecosystem services. To maximize the utility of water quality forecasts for managers and decision-makers, the forecasts must be accessible in near-real time, reliable, and continuously updated with environmental sensor data. However, developing iterative, near-term ecological forecasts requires complex cyber-infrastructure that is widely distributed, from sensors and computers collecting information at freshwater lakes and reservoirs to cloud computing services where forecast models are executed. Consequently, significant software challenges still remain for environmental scientists to easily and effectively deploy forecasting workflows. This project will address this need by designing, implementing, and deploying open-source software — FLARE: Forecasting Lake And Reservoir Ecosystems — that will enable the creation of flexible, scalable, robust, and near-real time iterative ecological forecasts. This software will be tested and widely disseminated to water utilities, drinking water managers, and many other decision-makers. FLARE will greatly advance the capability of the ecological research community to perform near-real time aquatic forecasts.The FLARE forecasting system is novel in its architecture, as it integrates a software-defined virtual distributed infrastructure spanning resources from sensor gateway devices at the edge of the network to cloud computing and storage. FLARE will support the flexible deployment of software in close proximity to water quality sensors in lakes and reservoirs, and in cloud resources for end-to-end data acquisition and processing. FLARE interconnects its distributed resources through a virtual private network to ensure data integrity and privacy in communications, and supports a flexible model applicable across a variety of lakes and reservoirs. Reusing best-of-breed technologies, FLARE builds upon and integrates several contemporary, widely-used open-source software frameworks in a manner that lowers the barrier to the deployment and management of ecological forecasting workflows by ecologists. Importantly, this project’s development of scalable and open-source cyberinfrastructure tools and end-to-end workflows for creating iterative aquatic forecasts will provide a critical resource for advancing the ecological forecasting research community, as well as provide a template for forecasting in other ecosystems. This project will build on and expand an existing program for cross-disciplinary teaching tools and research exchanges of undergraduate and graduate students to provide training at the intersection of computer science, freshwater science, and ecosystem modeling. Ultimately, this project will develop scalable, robust, secure workflows that will advance the capacity, practice, and training opportunities for ecological forecasting worldwide. Results from this project can be found at http://flare-forecast.orgThis 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.