Publications

No abstract available.

This panel responds to the December 2004 workshop on Eco-Informatics and Decision Making [1], which addressed how informatics tools can help with better management of natural resources and policy making. The workshop was jointly sponsored by the NSF, NBII, NASA, and EPA. Workshop participants recommended that informatics research in four IT areas be funded: modeling and simulation, data...

This project highlight reports on the 2004 workshop [1], as well as follow-up activities in 2005 and 2006, regarding how informatics tools can help manage natural resources and decide policy. The workshop was sponsored jointly by sponsored by the NSF, NBII, NASA, and EPA, and attended by practitioners from government and non-government agencies, and university researchers from the...

In order to be effective, information must be placed in the proper context and organized in a manner that is logical and (preferably) standardized. Recently, invasive alien species (IAS) scientists have begun to create online networks to share their information concerning IAS prevention and control. At a special networking session at the Beijing International Symposium on Biological...

No abstract available.

Resource managers often face significant information technology (IT) problems when integrating ecological or environmental information to make decisions. At a workshop sponsored by the NSF and USGS in December 2004, university researchers, natural resource managers, and information managers met to articulate IT problems facing ecology and environmental decision makers. Decision making IT...

No abstract available.

A well-known article in BioScience— probably the most widely cited scientific study on invasive species in recent years—calculated the annual cost of invasive species in the United States alone at $138 billion per year (Pimentel et al. 2000). The total annual cost of invasive species to human societies worldwide can therefore be estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars...

Established in 1879, to build and organize a collection of scientific materials in the earth sciences, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Library is the largest earth sciences collection in the world. The USGS Library System is managed by the Geographic Information Office (GIO), Information Policy and Services Office, and includes four libraries in Reston, Va., Denver, Colo., Menlo Park...

The need for coordinated regional and global electronic databases to assist prevention, early detection, rapid response, and control of biological invasions is well accepted. The Pacific Basin Information Node (PBIN), a node of the National Biological Information Infrastructure, has been increasingly engaged in the invasive species enterprise since its establishment in 2001. Since this...

Computer scientists, biologists, and natural resource managers recently met to examine the prospects for advancing computer science and information technology research by focusing on the complex and often-unique challenges found in the biodiversity and ecosystem domain. The workshop and its final report reveal that the biodiversity and ecosystem sciences are fundamentally information...

Understanding the ecology, condition, and changes of coastal areas requires data from many sources. Broad-scale and long-term ecological questions, such as global climate change, biodiversity, and cumulative impacts of human activities, must be addressed with databases that integrate data from several different research and monitoring programs. Various barriers, including widely...