Cyberinfrastructure-Team Project

Cyberinfrastructure attempts to connect data, computers, and people so they may combine their knowledge and expertise to solve problems and develop new scientific theories. Progress in this field depends on workforce development both within computer science and across many scientific disciplines. The goal of this University of New Mexico project (http://www.scidesign.org) is to train and distribute a group of interdisciplinary scientists who can employ cyberinfrastructure-enhanced approaches in their work. The target scientists are engaged in forecasting the impact of climate, population, and land cover/land use change on plant distributions in the American Southwest. This project will contribute to our understanding of sociotechnical issues of cross-disciplinary, distributed collaboration, while also generating innovative research approaches in a community that has not traditionally been represented in high-end scientific computing. It will form new partnerships across scientific and technical disciplines. It will provide an innovative new pathway for moving groups of scientists to cyberinfrastructure-based approaches that can be replicated in any science community. Such replication is essential for answering the complex, broad-scale, and integrative questions that typify 21st century science.