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An Agent-Based Interface to Terrestrial Ecological Forecasting |
This project builds upon the TOPS architecture to provide an automated system for ecological forecasting for decision support in the management of national parks and other protected areas in the U.S. The overall goal of the TOPS project is to develop a flexible architecture for ecological forecasting that combines multiple distributed data sources and models to provide near-real-time answers to questions about the state of the Earth system. By providing technologies for automation not only of ecological forecasting, but also of the post-processing on model outputs needed to visualize the results, TOPS will facilitate rapid data exploration and what-if analysis. This kind of ability will be essential to fully achieve the promise of a Sensor Web, in which huge volumes of real-time data are used to support activities ranging from basic science to monitoring and tracking severe weather and critical biospheric events. | 
| Yosemite National Park from MODIS onboard Aqua (December 3, 2005) |
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Research conducted under this REASoN funded project is focused on the automated production of a suite of ecosystem products for use in the operational management of national parks and other protected areas. Initial product development will focus on Yosemite National Park in California, with the operational system being implemented throughout the United States. Products currently under development use ecosystem models to integrate measurements from multiple satellite instruments, meteorological observations from multiple ground-based networks, and ancillary data sources such as soil databases and digital elevation models. The results from these models will provide data related to ecosystem function and will give managers advance warning of potential threats such as wildfire risk, invasive species, changes in water balance, anomalies in ecosystem productivity, and landcover changes both within the park and in areas adjacent to park boundaries. These ecosystem nowcasts and forecasts will be produced automatically using TOPS and the Ecocast architecture, which includes the IMAGEbot planner and an API for integration of new models. Ecocast will be used to retrieve, pre-process, and verify model inputs, and manage the distribution of forecasts of ecosystem conditions to end users. Previews of data products for Yosemite National Park are available here.
Partner Institutions
Support
Funding for this research is provided by the NASA REASoN (Research, Education, Applications Solutions Network) program.
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