CENS Technical Seminar Series

Multi-Ecosystem Modeling

Invited Speaker: Dr. Gary Geller
Date: March 13, 2009
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Venue: La Kretz Hall, 300-A

Abstract

Rapid climate and socioeconomic changes may be outrunning society's ability to understand, predict, and respond to change effectively. Natural resource managers of all kinds want better information about what these changes will be and how it will affect the resources they are managing. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, for example, needs to understand the impacts of these changes when assessing whether to list a species as threatened or endangered, and needs to know which of a variety of possible management strategies is most effective. Nearly all of these activities require computer models. However, current modeling capabilities, perhaps particularly in the ecology disciplines, cannot yet provide the needed information in a convenient manner to the target users. Some of this shortcoming is due to the complexity of the science, lack of critical observations, and other issues. Despite a great number of models, there is no ecological modeling infrastructure that can be consulted to shed light on important questions. In fact, even a clear vision for such an infrastructure seems to be lacking.

This presentation will discuss the need for a modeling infrastructure and describe a concept analogous to the World Wide Web for implementing it. This Model Web would be a system of interoperable computer models and databases communicating primarily via web services. It would not be planned and built--instead, like the World Wide Web, it would grow organically, without central control, within a framework of broad goals and data exchange standards. Models and datasets would be maintained and perhaps operated and served by a dynamic network of participants. While not a new idea, technology, science, observations, and models have all advanced to the point where it is now possible to start creating such a system, although it remains a long-term endeavor.

Biography

Dr. Geller is Deputy Manager of the NASA Ecological Forecasting Program. He has a M.S. in Botany from the University of Wyoming and a Ph.D. in Biology from UCLA.