Elements: Science-i Cyberinfrastructure for Forest Ecosystem Research

Forests, which have been sustaining food, water, energy security, and human well-being throughout history, are increasingly threatened by climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and forest degradation. Central to tackling these global challenges, collaborative forest research requires massive forest inventory data collected from around the world, high-performance computing facilities, as well as international and interdisciplinary expertise to provide evidence-based forest conservation and restoration practices. However, a lack of research data, computing capacity, and expert support for framing research questions poses a major obstacle to collaborative forest research, especially for research scientists from under-represented communities. To overcome this obstacle, this project creates a cyberinfrastructure “Science-i” with a customized data governance framework around which data contributors, researchers, and communities including indigenous stakeholders are connected in a secure, findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable platform to co-produce knowledge for saving the world’s forest ecosystems. Science-i leverages a growing community of 343 registered research scientists from 57 countries who will contribute data and expertise to support collaborative forest research, climate adaptation planning, and community decision-making. Science-i also enables high-value scientific inquiries with a framework that integrates forest inventory data from local data contributors with various levels of data-sharing restrictions, and allows shared use of advanced analysis tools, research codes, and high-performance computing resources by the under-represented researchers. The project incorporates Native American experience and expertise into the co-production of globally consistent and locally relevant knowledge. The objective of this project is to develop Science-i cyberinfrastructure to provide essential and timely support for data-driven collaborative forest research that addresses scientific questions central to saving the world’s forest ecosystems. Science-i is based on an innovative dynamic data governance framework that enables multi-source data management with dynamic policy enforcement. Customized to address the data-sharing challenges in collaborative forest research, this framework supports and incorporates multiple data-sharing policies, pre-defined by data contributors of local raw datasets, in a dynamic system so that these policies are enforced throughout the data lifecycle. Science-i collects local raw forest inventory datasets from all over the world, and integrates them into global datasets of different confidentiality levels so that they can be utilized by a number of ongoing research projects. The team- wide collaboration is supported by a secure project sandbox that enables project members to utilize a machine learning toolkit and built-in community collaboration functions to co-produce globally consistent and locally relevant knowledge that will advance our understanding of the ecological processes of global forest systems, and elucidate fundamental principles that identify and explain terrestrial biodiversity and its interactions with the environment over space and time. This project engages communities with various knowledge co-production, education, and outreach activities, and supports twelve research projects in Science-i led by female PIs, graduate students, postdocs, and/or other early-career researchers. Science-i also engages diverse audiences and communities through collaborative outreaching events such as annual global webinars co-hosted with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Several Science-i research projects are aimed at promoting climate-resilient forest management and conservation among rural and indigenous communities. Native American stakeholders, coordinated by the National Indian Carbon Coalition will take a leading role in co-producing policies and practical guidelines based on the research results. Two virtual and two in-person workshops will be organized to engage users, stakeholders, and developers, including 25 participants from under-represented communities who will be supported to attend in-person workshops. This award by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the NSF Division of Biological Infrastructure (BIO/DBI). 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.