Prototyping an online wetland ecosystem services model using open model sharing standards

Abstract

a b s t r a c tGreat interest currently exists for developing ecosystem models to forecast how ecosystem services may change under alternative land use and climate futures. Ecosystem services are diverse and include supporting services or functions (e.g., primary production, nutrient cycling), provisioning services (e.g., wildlife, groundwater), regulating services (e.g., water purification, floodwater retention), and even cultural services (e.g., ecotourism, cultural heritage). Hence, the knowledge base necessary to quantify ecosystem services is broad and derived from many diverse scientific disciplines. Building the required interdisciplinary models is especially challenging as modelers from different locations and times may develop the disciplinary models needed for ecosystem simulations, and these models must be identified and made accessible to the interdisciplinary simulation. Additional difficulties include inconsistent data structures, formats, and metadata required by geospatial models as well as limitations on computing, storage, and connectivity. Traditional standalone and closed network systems cannot fully support sharing and integrating interdisciplinary geospatial models from variant sources. To address this need, we developed an approach to openly share and access geospatial computational models using distributed Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques and open geospatial standards. We included a means to share computational models compliant with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Processing Services (WPS) standard to ensure modelers have an efficient and simplified means to publish new models. To demonstrate our approach, we developed five disciplinary models that can be integrated and shared to simulate a few of the ecosystem services (e.g., water storage, waterfowl breeding) that are provided by wetlands in the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of North America.Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Software availability

ESLab application to a boreal watershed in southern Finland: preparing for a virtual research environment of ecosystem services

“…The constantly increasing amount of online services for the environmental data and its processing provides substantial possibilities for the ES research. In environmental disciplines in general, the development of virtual services based on open data and model sharing standards is currently intense (Feng et al 2011;Ames et al 2012;Evangelidis et al 2014). While the full potential of information produced by public organizations is far from being realized (EC 2011b), it seems evident that virtual research environments aiming at specific topics can be expected to accelerate the collaboration between researchers and eventually enhance the utilization of research results, even to promote democracy.…”

“…ES models often involve exchanging and analysing of geospatial data (Feng et al 2011). Traditionally programs to run these models are installed in standalone or closed network systems.…”

Web Mapping Architectures Based on Open Specifications and Free and Open Source Software in the Water Domain

“…In the water resources domain, the possibility of migrating desktop-based algorithms to Web services have been tested (Dí az et al, 2007), not only for predicting flood areas (Auynirundronkool et al, 2012;Lanig et al, 2008;Müller et al, 2010;Walenciak et al, 2009), but also for water resources modeling in general (Feng et al, 2011). In the water resources domain, it is common to carry out time-consuming tasks for collecting, analyzing and processing large volumes of hydrological data through the use of traditional desktop GIS systems.…”

Establishment and Application of Wetlands Ecosystem Services and Sustainable Ecological Evaluation Indicators

“…Factors such as climate change, rural poverty, and increased human population size have resulted in a wetlands loss of~30%-50% in the last decade [1][2][3]. As well as providing ecosystem services such as flood control, coastline protection, nutrient recycling, carbon sequestration, and ecotourism, wetlands support many specialized plants and animal species [4][5][6][7][8].…”