Collaborative Research: OpenTopography - A Cyberinfrastructure Facility for Advancing Geoscience Research and Education

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This project will continue support and development of the OpenTopography cyberinfrastructure platform that provides web-based access to high resolution topography from airborne light detection and ranging (lidar), terrestrial laser scanning, radar, and photogrammetry at a range of scales in support of surface Earth process research, training, and education. The availability of high resolution digital topographic data and shallow water bathymetric data has been revolutionary for Earth and environmental sciences and engineering, contributing to the study of Earth surface processes (e.g., earthquakes and volcanos, landslides, riverine sediment transport), vegetation dynamics, and human modification of the Earth's surface. This project will enhance access to data and processing tools that improve efficiency and economic competitiveness, in addition to continuing to facilitate the use of OpenTopography resources in K-12, undergraduate, and graduate STEM education. The community-focused OpenTopography data facility will continue to grow the amount of high resolution topography data available to the community and expand data access pathways and processing tools, while also strengthening interoperability and ensuring scalability via cloud and high performance computing in order to meet the growing demands of the Earth science research and education community. OpenTopography will also continue its education and training efforts by conducting workshops and training courses along with building supporting tools like computational notebooks and reproducible workflows. These computations and analyses will support academic, educational, and applied use and reuse of the OpenTopography data holdings. Detailed usage metrics will be captured to demonstrate the impact of the resource and return on investment of the data.This project is jointly funded by the Geoinformatics and the Geomorphology and Land Use Dynamics programs in the Division of Earth Sciences.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.