Saturday, January 21, 2012

Web-based environmental simulation: bridging the gap between scientific modelling and decision-making

This "just accepted" article results from an interdisciplinary project led by Wouter Buytaert. The project was funded by the NERC Environmental Services for Poverty Alleviation scheme and explores the potential of Virtual Observatories for local resource management. One of the key question is how to make environmental information and simulations useful for resource management and local decision making in Ecuador (Yasuni park) and Peru (Huaraz and Iquitos). The two other co-authors are from the local project partner CONDESAN.

Web-based environmental simulation: bridging the gap between scientific modelling and decision-making

Web technologies offer the potential to re-configure how environmental models are developed and used, breaking models out of their scientific environment and make them available for ubiquitous processing and analysis of environmental information. This will not be straightforward. Several technical and scientific challenges have to be overcome to ensure that models provide the right data for decision-making, and that model outputs are interpreted correctly and used in an appropriate context.

The article can be found at the journals website (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es2031278, open access after free registration) or below.

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