Grid-enabled OGC environment for EO data and services in support of Canada's forest applications

System of Agents for Forest Observation Research with Advanced Hierarchies (SAFORAH) is a grid-enabled environment that makes optimum use of distributed data storage facilities. It supports EO data collaboration among various Canadian research organizations and provides ready access to the most current, consistent and reliable forest resource information through various network environments. SAFORAH was built with an extensible data grid network based on the Globus Toolkit and transparently presents the distributed data storage facilities across multiple organizations and government agencies as one single data archive to users to facilitate easy EO data archiving and distribution. Currently, four Canadian Forestry Centres located in Victoria British Columbia, Cornerbrook Newfoundland, Edmonton, Alberta and Laurentian Québec, and Environment Canada's Canadian Wildlife Service are operationally connected via Canarie to the SAFORAH data grid. The connection to a large petabyte storage facility under development at the University of Victoria (UVic) was also established. SAFORAH has been modified to provide data services based on the OGC standard using NWGISS to support the distribution of comprehensive, integrated and thematic EO data for forest applications. SAFORAH has been used in the EOSD project to support the national monitoring of Canada's forests. This use has demonstrated that SAFORAH is a practical tool for collaborative research to facilitate the sharing of EO data. The extension of SAFORAH to handle OGC requests has enabled the distribution of landcover product tiles from multiple storage sites seamlessly to national and international users. The web address for SAFORAH is www.saforah-org.