Environmental Cyberinfrastructure

Spatially extensive observing systems for environmental research, together with the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research on the dynamics of complex environmental systems, create the need for a sophisticated information infrastructure to support these observing systems and to facilitate the integrated use of data from them. There are a number of questions about how to best construct such a cyberinfrastructure. To help answer these questions and to promote planning for Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Observatories (CEO), this solicitation requests proposals for the development of practical environmental cyberinfrastructure prototypes along with a demonstration of their capability to answer significant environmental research questions. Proposals should be for projects that pursue an end-to-end approach to an information infrastructure prototype. Proposals should identify the types of data involved and the ways in which users might wish to use such data. The proposed projects should include the careful exploration of use cases followed by deployment of a prototype that implements these use cases.