Abstract
Ecohydrology models require diverse geospatial input datasets (e.g. terrain, soils, vegetation species and leaf area index), the acquisition and preparation of which are labor intensive, yielding workflows that are difficult to reproduce. EcohydroLib is a software framework for managing spatial data acquisition and preparation workflows for ecohydrology modeling, while automatically capturing metadata and provenance information. The goal of EcohydroLib is to enable water scientists to spend less time acquiring and manipulating geospatial data and more time using ecohydrology models to test hypotheses, while making it easier for models to be shared and scientific results to be reproduced. This increased reproducibility, ease of sharing, and researcher productivity can enable both model inter comparison of interest within a country, and site inter comparison of interest across national borders. Currently, EcohydroLib allows modelers to work with geospatial data stored locally as well as high spatial resolution U.S. national spatial data available via web services, for example 30-meter digital elevation model and land cover data, and 1:12,000 scale soils data. While researchers working in watersheds outside the U.S. can use EcohydroLib, they must manually download data for their study areas before these data can be imported into EcohydroLib workflows. Though national agencies in the U.S. and Australia offer some datasets via web services, with a few exceptions these are either lower resolution datasets or data made available via Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) interfaces of use primarily for cartography, rather than via OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) or Web Feature Service (WFS) interfaces needed for integration with numerical models. In this paper we explore: (1) availability of high-resolution national geospatial data web services in the United States and Australia; and (2) integration of Australian web services with EcohydroLib.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Band, L.: Effect of land surface representation on forest water and carbon budgets. Journal of Hydrology 150(2-4), 749–772 (1993), doi:10.1016/0022-1694(93)90134-u
Band, L.E., Cadenasso, M.L., Grimmond, C.S., Grove, J.M., Pickett, S.T.A.: Heterogeneity in urban Ecosystems: Patterns and Processes. In: Lovett, G.M., Turner, M.G., Jones, C.G., Weathers, K.C. (eds.) Ecosystem Function in Heterogeneous Landscapes, New York, pp. 257–278 (2005), http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/0-387-24091-8_13
Deelman, E., et al.: Workflows and e-Science: An overview of workflow system features and capabilities. Future Generation Computer Systems 25(5), 528–540 (2009)
Duffy, C., et al.: Designing a Road Map for Geoscience Workflows. Eos 93(24), 225–226 (2012), http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012EO240002.shtml
Geoscience Australia, Metadata for SRTM-derived 1 Second Digital Elevation Models Version 1.0 (2011), http://www.ga.gov.au/metadata-gateway/metadata/record/gcat_72759
Goble, C.A., et al.: myExperiment: a repository and social network for the sharing of bioinformatics workflows. Nucleic Acids Research 38(Web Server), W677–W682 (2010)
Guo, D., et al.: Scientific workflow challenges. In: WIRADA Science Symposium Proceedings, Melbourne, Australia, August 1-5, pp. 54–60 (2012)
Plale, B.: The challenges and opportunities of workflow systems in environmental research. In: WIRADA Science Symposium Proceedings, Melbourne, Australia, August 1-5, pp. 48–53 (2012)
Rodríguez-Iturbe, I.: Ecohydrology: a hydrologic perspective of climate-soil-vegetation dynamics. Water Resources Research 36(1), 3–9 (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Miles, B., Band, L.E. (2015). Ecohydrology Models without Borders?. In: Denzer, R., Argent, R.M., Schimak, G., Hřebíček, J. (eds) Environmental Software Systems. Infrastructures, Services and Applications. ISESS 2015. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 448. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15994-2_31
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15994-2_31
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15993-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15994-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)