2018 ESA Annual Meeting (August 5 -- 10)

SYMP 9 - Ecoinformatics Advances: Building Technosocial Systems for Open Data and Big Science

Wednesday, August 8, 2018: 8:00 AM-11:30 AM
352, New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
Organizer:
John W. (Jack) Williams
Co-organizers:
Brian Enquist and Corinna Gries
Moderator:
Margaret O'Brien
Ecologists often study processes operating at continental to global scales using amalgams of disparate data sources. Ecological data are, increasingly big data characterized by large data volumes and analysis; high heterogeneity of data types, spatiotemporal scales, and methods (variety); multiple potential sources of uncertainty and error (veracity); and, increasingly, high rates of data generation and analysis (velocity) (LaDeau et al. 2017). Challenges of variety and veracity, in particular, have been long-standing informatic barriers to achieving global-scale syntheses in biodiversity science and remain major frontiers in ecoinformatics research. In general, ecologists (and scientists in general) vastly underleverage the collective power of the data they generate. In response to these trends and challenges, multiple groups have begun to build and coalesce around multiple nodes of ecological data. Big data in ecology seems to be emerging as a federated ecosystem, or network of networks. Multiple communities are building and curating multiple kinds of data resources. Other scientists are building systems to interlink these data and build analytical systems that span multiple nodes. Ecoinformatics seeks to build the informatic resources that enable better science: larger data volumes brought to bear on the question of interest; the ability to gather and synthesize multiple heterogeneous data streams; the ability for specialists to quickly add, annotate, and improve existing data resources; start-to-finish workflows that maximize transparency and reproducibility. Ecoinformatics is often thought of narrowly, as a solely technological pursuit, but good ecoinformatics rests on three pillars: 1) strong scientific drivers and motivating questions (which guides priorities for allocating scarce resources), 2) a strong emphasis on building community-based platforms (because ecological expertise is highly distributed among scientists and institutions), and 3) the technological infrastructure that supports open data, linked data, and linked data-model loops. In this session, we seek to review the state of the art in the emerging research field of ecoinformatics, bringing together leaders in building the data, computational, and community resources that enable global-scale big-data ecology.
8:00 AM
Community-curated data resources in ecology and paleoecology: Building meso-scale data from the long tail
John W. (Jack) Williams, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Jessica L. Blois, University of California - Merced; Simon J Goring, University of Wisconsin; Eric C. Grimm, Illinois State Museum; Alison Smith, Kent State
8:30 AM
The human factor in big data and ecoinformatics
Ankur R. Desai, University of Wisconsin
9:00 AM
Building diverse global datasets by building communities and networks
Catherine M. O'Reilly, Illinois State University; Stephanie Hampton, Washington State University; Sapna Sharma, York University; Derek Gray, Wilfrid Laurier University; Jordan S. Read, USGS
9:30 AM
9:40 AM
Muy BIEN: Next steps in a global workflow for integrating plant botanical observations
Brian Enquist, University of Arizona; Cory Merow, University of Connecticut; Brian McGill, University of Maine; Brad Boyle, University of Arizona; Nathan Casler, Planet Labs; Xiao Feng, University of Arizona; Brian S. Maitner, University of Arizona; Jeanine McGann, University of Arizona; Daniel Park, Harvard University; Patrick Roehrdanz, Conservation International; Lee Hannah, Conservation International
10:10 AM
EDI: Addressing accessibility and re-usability of highly variable ecological data
Corinna Gries, University of Wisconsin; Mark S. Servilla, University of New Mexico; Margaret O'Brien, University of California, Santa Barbara; Kristin Vanderbilt, University of New Mexico; Duane Costa, University of New Mexico; Colin A. Smith, University of Wisconsin; Susanne Grossman-Clarke, University of Wisconsin; Paul Hanson, University of Wisconsin
10:40 AM
COMPADRE: A case for interconnectivity among ecological databases
Roberto Salguero Gomez, Oxford University; Judy Che-Castaldo, Lincoln Park Zoo; Owen Jones, University of Southern Denmark; David Hodgson, University of Exeter; Jean H. Burns, Case Western Reserve University; Haydee Hernandez-Yanez, University of Missouri-St. Louis; Tiffany M Knight, Washington University in St. Louis; Hal Caswell, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Thomas Ezard, University of Southampton; Iain Stott, University of Exeter
11:10 AM
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