DeCODER | EarthCube

Democratized Cyberinfrastructure for Open Discovery to Enable Research

Standardize how scientific data is described

Allow search engines for scientific data to support discoverability AND
Facilitate the usage of the data

The new NSF CSSI Democratized Cyberinfrastructure for Open Discovery to Enable Research (DeCODER) project will expand and extend the successful EarthCube GeoCODES framework and community to unify data and tool description and reuse across geoscience domains. (See announcement.)

GeoCODES Portal

DeCODER announces mini research opportunities to investigate science questions leveraging science-on-schema

As one aspect of its activities, DeCODER is inviting proposals for focused, limited-term efforts to investigate science questions leveraging DeCODER data and tools and science-on-schema for research data. Proposals should encompass work plans of 6 months or less and must clearly describe expected outcomes (e.g., written document, conference presentation or poster, community event, etc.) and how success will be measured. MORE Information

Adoption of science-on-schema

The internet works because of defined standards and protocols (e.g. TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML). This allows software, which must be sustained, to change and evolve over time, with better software with new features to emerge (e.g. new browsers, new web servers), while still allowing everything to just work from the user perspective.

That’s what we are doing here for research data through the adoption of science-on-schema.

DeCODER will continue to partner with ESIP and the Council of Data Facilities with the adoption of this standard across the partnering geoscience data centers, building search aggregators that can now crawl data center collections and construct a centralized index by which users, or other software through a provided API, can find data of interest across all available sources.

Science applications

To understand and address critical geosciences challenges we must find and leverage data and tools from across national and international facilities and programs. While building a flexible and extensible framework to fit many geosciences domains, the DeCODER project will also work with three specific communities, to ensure a tight connection to real science needs:

Center for Ecosystem Forecasting

The Center develops tools that forecast everyday services provided by ecosystems, like water quality, forest production, and more. They develop and deploy environmental sensors, build robust ecological models, and work closely with forecast users to co-create tools that can guide decision-making on human health and well-being. Their goal is to develop reliable forecasts and intuitive visualizations that protect our communities and advance our understanding of ecosystems.

Learn more

PODCAST - Open Geo AI:

Unveiling Satellite Insights through Open Data

In this podcast , Tao Wen and Carl Boettiger share real-life success stories at the intersection of open data, AI, and satellite information. From ML models for land-water systems to open science initiatives, explore how diverse sectors leverage time series models, R environments, and NASA's Open Scripts project on AWS Cloud for transformative decision-making.

Listen to this episode and others in the series here.

Satellites and Sea Ice:

Using NASA Data for Ecological Forecasting in the Arctic

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Deep blue stretching as far as the eye can see, silver flickers glinting in the darkness, and stark white patches rolling by: the marine Arctic is a mysterious place, becoming increasingly fragile. However, for ecological forecasters, this mystery is mitigated by the use of light transmission models, including the work of University of Maryland climate scientist Alek Petty. One of Petty’s current projects is titled “ICEY ECOSYSTEMS: Arctic Sea Ice Light Transmission For Assessing Under-Ice Ecosystem Dynamics” and leverages NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite as a source of data. Learn more

Vanderbilt Graduate Student Provides Accessible Data for Inland Aquatic Ecosystems

When dusk descends, human-built environments light up. Cities, roads and residential areas emit artificial light throughout the night, raising important questions about how light pollution affects nearby ecosystems. In freshwater environments, these effects are still not fully understood, particularly in small lakes where biological and geochemical processes can change over daily and seasonal timescales. Standing at the shores of murky waters, each ripple beckons for a dive towards deeper research.

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) DeCODER program, Mahir Tajwar, a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University studying aquatic biogeochemistry, developed a FAIR and reproducible framework for organizing, modeling, visualizing and sharing lake ecosystem metabolism data. Learn More

University of Arizona Researcher Explores the Link between Cattle Grazing and Flooding

Over the years, a combination of overgrazing and intensifying rains has made flooding a critical issue in Kyrgyzstan’s capital city, Bishkek. As a result, University of Arizona researcher Sam Anderson, in collaboration with local partners at Osh State University in Kyrgyzstan, has investigated the link between livestock grazing and its impact on the environment. In his project entitled, “Seasonal Monitoring of Grazing Impacts and Infiltration near Bishkek: A Schema-Compliant Ecological Baseline,” Anderson aims to create an ecological baseline for future research. Learn More