Workshop for Aquatic Ecosystem Sustainability

June 13-14, 2011Marina del Rey, CA

http://water.isi.edu/

Welcome!

Tom HarmonUC Merced

Yolanda GilUSC ISI

Ewa DeelmanUSC ISI

Craig KnoblockUSC ISI

Pedro SzekelyUSC ISI

Terry BenzelUSC ISI

USC Information Sciences Institute

Goals of the Workshop

The goal of the workshop is to develop a vision for aquatic ecosystems research that will accelerate advances in modeling and discovery through software innovations. To complement cyberinfrastructure projects that look more at the needs of a community, we will look at the needs of individual researchers. By analyzing processes and tools currently used in the scientific discovery cycle of individual researchers, our goal is to expose current bottlenecks and elicit requirements for necessary software capabilities to accelerate their work and open up new possibilities.

The “long tail” of scientists

Participants• Matt Becker, California State University Long Beach• Amy Braverman, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory• Dan Crichton, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory• Todd Crowl, Utah State University• Stephanie Granger, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory• Qinghua Guo, University of California Merced• Paul Hanson, University of Wisconsin at Madison• Andreas Hofmann, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)• Burt Jones, University of Southern California• Mike McCann, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)• Timothy Stough, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory • Ryan Utz, National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)• Sandra Villamizar, University of California Merced

Schedule: Monday June 13

8:30-9:00 Continental breakfast9:00-9:30 Welcome, introductions, and workshop goals9:30-10:00 Long-term goals for aquatic ecosystems sustainability, Tom Harmon10:00-10:15 Discussion10:15-10:30 Break10:30-11:30 Brief presentations of current challenges, All participants11:30-12:00 Planning breakout topics12:00-1:00 Lunch (provided)

Schedule: Monday June 13

1:00-2:30 Breakout sessions (First theme)2:30-2:45 Break, write session reports2:45-3:30 Reports from breakout groups (First theme)3:30-5:00 Breakout sessions (Second theme)5:00-5:15 Break, write session reports5:15-6:00 Reports from breakout groups (Second theme)

6:30-9:30 Group dinner at Chef Hannes

Schedule: Tuesday June 14

8:00-8:30 Continental breakfast8:30-9:00 Workflows, semantics, provenance, metadata9:00-9:30 Planning new breakout topics9:30-11:00 Breakout sessions (Third theme)11:00-11:15 Break, write session reports11:15-12:00 Reports from breakout groups12:00-12:30 Synthesis12:30-1:30 Lunch (provided)1:30-3:00 Synthesis (continued)3:00-5:00 Writing final report

Brief Presentations of Current Challenges(Mail slides to fabio@isi.edu)

• "Multi-Scale, Sensor-Based Net Daily Metabolism Estimates in Streams, Lakes, and Coastal Waters: Master Variable of Aquatic Ecosystem Changes?", by Tom Harmon

• "Improving watershed conservation efforts using existent ecohydrology data", by Ryan Utz• "Multi-scale time series analysis of phyloplankton data from lake observatories: A case

study of 'bagging' from the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network", by Paul Hanson• "How do we represent data as models and models as data", by Matt Becker• "Data Preparation Using Karma", by Pedro Szekely and Craig Knoblock• "A tool for estuarine biogeochemical modeling: an open source, modular biogeochemical

modeling and data storage system", by Andreas Hofmann• "Data Mining, Data Fusion, and Analysis of Massive Distributed Data Sets", by Amy

Braverman • Mike McCann• Burt Jones• Ewa Deelman• Qinghua Guo• Tim Stough

First Breakout Themes• What level of data cleaning/filtering/averaging and organization, (underlying

data structures) and analysis is appropriate for the communities working on ______ to bring about broader usage and more rapid scientific interpretation:– Group 1: rivers – Tim, Ryan, Pedro, Sandra, Fabio– Group 2: lakes – Amy, Stephanie, Craig, Burt, Ewa, Andreas– Group 3: coastal/oceans – Paul, Yolanda, Tom, Matt, Qinghua

• How is the data best offered to domain scientists , are there common analyses that can be accomplished for them?

• What grand questions would be answered sooner?– e.g., identify in time and space the “tipping point” or onset of algal blooms, and start

to pose predictive models• If you like, OK to flip this and think from grand questions first (top-down

model)

Second Breakout Themes

1. How data moves across tools: how could this be easier – 10cr

1. Paul, Tom, Matt, Craig, Stephanie, Mike, Qinghua2. How to make data repositories (e.g., JPL,

CDEC) more useful – 9cr1. Dan, Tim, Amy, Yolanda, Fabio

3. How to make your data (and models) more usable to other people in your field

1. Ryan, Burt, Sandra, Andreas

Third Breakout Themes1. Pick a grand science question of common interest (Human impacts on aquatic

ecology: Nutrients , Carbon and Algal Blooms)a) Sketch out key in-situ sensor data needsb) Sketch out key mobile sensor data needsc) Sketch out key remote sensing productsd) Sketch out key 3rd party data needse) Maybe name a couple of key non-sensor data products

2. Sketch out a workflow to help answer the question (don’t worry about numbers of sensors, coverage, etc)

a) data/metadata acquisitionb) storage for easy access by community (global lake carbon balance)c) cleaning/QA/QCd) Basic visualizatione) some reasonable data analysis components, both exploratory and hypothesis-driven

3. Try to flag bottlenecks, challenges, and (if possible) estimate effort.