Recent LNO Projects

Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK)

The Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) is a five year initiative designed to create cyberinfrastructure for ecological, environmental, and biodiversity research and to educate the ecological community about ecoinformatics.

SEEK participants are building an integrated data grid (EcoGrid) for accessing a wide variety of ecological and biodiversity data and analytical tools (Kepler) for efficiently utilizing these data stores to advance ecological and biodiversity science. An intelligent middleware system (SMS) will facilitate integration and synthesis of data and models within these systems.

Research Coordination Networking (RCN) Training

Research coordination Network (RCN): Resource Discovery Initiative for Field Stations (RDFIS) is and NSF-funded project to develop the informatics framework that can facilitate storage, discovery and access to the strategic information resources that are collectively held at North American biological field stations.

Project Objectives and Research activities include: establishing a North American Field Station Data Registry and Repository; Initiating a Thesaurus for Field Biology; Developing a site characteristics database for North American Field Stations; creating a bibliography of North American Field Station Publications; Developing a WWW-accessible database of field station QA/QC and Standard methods. Project Objectives will be accomplished through two integrated networking actives: (1) a research focus that encompasses five inter-related resource discovery components and (2) intensive training component that provides field station personnel with a solid foundation in the computational and informatics skills that are critical for developing, archiving, managing and communicating data and information resources.

Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB)

A national network intended to facilitate ecological and environmental research on biocomplexity. For scientists, the KNB is an efficient way to discover, access, interpret, integrate and analyze complex ecological data from a highly-distributed set of field stations, laboratories, research sites, and individual researchers. Morpho, Ecological Metadata Language (EML), and Metacat are some of the ecoinformatics tools being developed by the KNB project to manage ecological data at field and research stations across the country.