eHabitat, a multi-purpose Web Processing Service for ecological modeling

Gregoire Dubois, M. Schulz, Jon Skøien, Lucy Bastin, Stephen Peedell

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The number of interoperable research infrastructures has increased significantly with the growing awareness of the efforts made by the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). One of the Societal Benefit Areas (SBA) that is benefiting most from GEOSS is biodiversity, given the costs of monitoring the environment and managing complex information, from space observations to species records including their genetic characteristics. But GEOSS goes beyond simple data sharing to encourage the publishing and combination of models, an approach which can ease the handling of complex multi-disciplinary questions. It is the purpose of this paper to illustrate these concepts by presenting eHabitat, a basic Web Processing Service (WPS) for computing the likelihood of finding ecosystems with equal properties to those specified by a user. When chained with other services providing data on climate change, eHabitat can be used for ecological forecasting and becomes a useful tool for decision-makers assessing different strategies when selecting new areas to protect. eHabitat
can use virtually any kind of thematic data that can be considered as useful when defining ecosystems and their future persistence under different climatic or development scenarios. The paper will present the architecture and illustrate the concepts through case studies which forecast the impact of climate change on protected areas or on the ecological niche of an African bird.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)123–133
Number of pages11
JournalEnvironmental Modelling and Software
Volume41
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2013

Bibliographical note

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Environmental modelling and software. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Dubois, G., Schulz, M., Skøien, J., Bastin, L., & Peedell, S. eHabitat, a multi-purpose Web Processing Service for ecological modeling. Environmental modelling and software, Vol. 41 (2013) DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2012.11.005

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