LTER Site Byte

LTER Site: Central Arizona - Phoenix

Contributor: Corinna Gries and Peter McCartney (Aug 08, 2005)

Site Byte:

This year at CAP the main web site saw some improvements and additions. Overall programming changes were implemented to increase the speed at which database searches retrieve and display results. CAP’s new ‘Integrated Project Areas’ are described and associated subprojects and people are displayed in the same way as LTER core areas. An image library with search interface was added and currently we are working on a CAP sites atlas. An application built on ArcIMS/html viewer that allows users to display a map with the locations of all sites at which research activities are taking place within the CAP area. This will enable the user to locate sites at which for instance all long term monitoring programs are currently active. With appropriate background layers other questions may be answered, e.g. in which watershed a site is located or which soil conditions are prevalent at a certain site, etc. This application was developed in collaboration with the ASU GIS lab.

However, the main thrust this year was finishing the programming for an intranet (http://iis.asu.edu/intranet). This web application allows CAP researchers in a secure environment to enter and edit their personal information, their publications, calendar events, information on datasets they are producing, and information for each subproject. For each subproject beginning and end, a short description, associated people, and an annual report can be entered. Although we are still working out bugs this application has been successfully employed to gather information for this year’s annual report to NSF. With this year’s experiences further improvements, especially in the area of editing and bulk uploading of publications will be implemented next year.

The Center for Environmental Studies, where CAP LTER is housed, became the International Institute for Sustainability with a large private endowment to help promote ASU's development of a strong research and educational mission in sustainability.

ASU was awarded a 5 year grant for the "Decision Center for a Desert City". This project compliments CAP LTER by providing a strong outreach to the decision-making community in central Arizona. Funded by the NSF Decision Making Under Uncertainty program, the project focuses on the social and ecological issues surrounding long -term water management in the Phoenix basin. Plans are under development this summer for a tri-university partnership in a distributed water information system which will expand the core data archive that was started by CAP LTER to a state-wide integrated system.

IIS completed its NSF ITR project "Integrating Urban Models Through Network Services". This project focused on developing solutions for integrating distributed models maintained by different research and management institutions within the valley. The project developed web service wrappers to Grass and R software packages, web interfaces for model execution requests, extensions to EML metadata for documenting model inputs and outputs, and a set of actors for Kepler designed to interface with our Xylopia web services. Development started under this project will continue as part of the DCDC project.

IIS Informatics lab collaborated with our Departments of Anthropology and Computing Science on a successful NSF Human and Social Dynamics proposal on developing a national cyberinfrastructure for Archaeology. This pilot project supported a workshop at NCEAS in December which had participation from SEEK and GEON personnel, plus a small pilot study using OWL ontologies to guide automated reclassification of archaeological datasets. A larger proposal is now being considered by the NSF CyberTools program which, if funded will allow IIS to expand and refine the work we have done with EML, Xanthoria, etc to a broader disciplinary base.

Robin Schroeder (whom many of you know as Robin Schoeninger) has taken a position as assistant curator for the ASU lichen herbarium and data manager for all ASU natural history collections. She will continue to collaborate with our lab helping to maintain and expand our internet biodiversity applications. An advertisement for a new programmer position at IIS will be forthcoming.

The ASU GIS lab has moved to a new home with the ASU Institute for Geography. Again, we are expecting the fruitful collaboration to continue.

Web design by Wade Sheldon, Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER