New GIF/MVZ collaboration: the Predictive Biosystems Informatics Engine
The Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology (BiGCB) has been awarded $1.5 million by the W.M. Keck Foundation to develop a Predictive Biosystems Informatics Engine (PBIE), the informatics infrastructure needed to access, visualize, and analyze rich data, and provide the foundation for building the next generation of models of the biotic response to global change. The GIF is involved in the database, web application, and the UI portions of this exciting project.
The PBIE will innovate with cutting-edge technologies, and once operational, will enable cross-disciplinary exploration of the vast and disparate data sources required to understand biotic response to global change.
The PBIE will consist of three major components:
- A Collection Database and Interface Module, which will serve data from the museum collections, field stations, and faculty labs;
- A Baselayer Database and Web Application Module that will serve geospatial data on observed or modeled climates, environmental parameters, empirical and predicted species ranges, vegetation cover, etc. and,
- A User Interface that will enable rapid access, visualization, and analysis of the data made available. It will also allow users to import their own data, for example, the results of predictive climate change models, as well as export data for more intensive analysis.
More information on the project can be found here.
The picture at left is one from William Bowen's panorama atlas for California.