Building and studying a virtual organization for adaptation to climate change: The Collaboratory for Adaptation to Climate Change
Grants/Fellowships in support:
2010. National Science Foundation
Project Overview:
Global change presents unprecedented challenges for humans and ecological systems globally. It is increasingly evident that adaptation strategies are required to cope with the rapid and sweeping changes. These strategies will likely require an unprecedented level of coordination, data gathering, tools, and cross-communication between a number of disciplines and agencies in order to develop novel approaches that can be shared, implemented, and critiqued over time. Classically, this collaboration has been conducted via face-to-face interaction at meetings and conferences or via publication in scientific literature. Though these platforms have been and will continue to play an important role in the future of global change adaptation there is also a compelling need to connect people more frequently and deeply, across distance and disciplines in order to share resources, ideas, and innovation. In order to address this need, we have created the Collaboratory for Adaptation to Climate Change (adapt.nd.edu), an online platform for community building, data and tool sharing, and knowledge generation.
Activities Conducted:
Oversight and project management
Sociology research cluster:
Environmental Niche Modeling
Survey of global change and managed relocation
Community outreach
Adaptation Workflows
Site administration and content generation
2010. National Science Foundation
Project Overview:
Global change presents unprecedented challenges for humans and ecological systems globally. It is increasingly evident that adaptation strategies are required to cope with the rapid and sweeping changes. These strategies will likely require an unprecedented level of coordination, data gathering, tools, and cross-communication between a number of disciplines and agencies in order to develop novel approaches that can be shared, implemented, and critiqued over time. Classically, this collaboration has been conducted via face-to-face interaction at meetings and conferences or via publication in scientific literature. Though these platforms have been and will continue to play an important role in the future of global change adaptation there is also a compelling need to connect people more frequently and deeply, across distance and disciplines in order to share resources, ideas, and innovation. In order to address this need, we have created the Collaboratory for Adaptation to Climate Change (adapt.nd.edu), an online platform for community building, data and tool sharing, and knowledge generation.
Activities Conducted:
Oversight and project management
- Managed a diverse group of PIs, post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduates in a multi-year, interdisciplinary project to create and study a virtual platform for collaboration on the topic of climate change adaptation (adapt.nd.edu).
Sociology research cluster:
- Managed a group of graduate students and undergraduates that collected and analyzed clickstream data from the Collaboratory membership to determine user interaction with the site and each other.
Environmental Niche Modeling
- Managed a team of computer scientists, biologists, and natural resources managers to create a collaborative online tool to enable users to run, display, and evaluate environmental niche models in a cloud-based cyber-infrastructure (SPACES).
- Created a user community focused around the concept of environmental niche modeling to serve as a unifying gathering place for researchers, academics, and natural resources managers to learn about, discuss, and improve the implementation of niche models.
Survey of global change and managed relocation
- Managed a group of computer scientists, biologists, and political scientists to visualize a national survey of professional opinions regarding the topic of climate change impacts on natural systems and the concept of managed relocation of organisms as an adaptation strategy.
Community outreach
- Engaged and formed mutual collaborations with a large number of diverse organizations and stakeholder groups to create web-based, topic-specific communities of practice.
- Presented the platform, tools, and research products at multiple national conferences and events and via webinars to diverse audiences of academics, governmental organizations, natural resources managers and stake holders.
Adaptation Workflows
- Developed a novel web-based decision-support tool in an effort to digitize a variety of previously paper-based adaptation strategies. These workflows incorporate resources, tools, and links to other relevant content across the web in an effort to facilitate richer and constantly up-to-date guides to varied adaptation topics. Users also have the opportunity to ask questions and leave knowledge in associated groups and discussion sections.
Site administration and content generation
- Administered day-to-day operation of the site and its associated components
- Daily content creation and aggregation including news, relevant journal articles, funding opportunities, conferences/webinars, and position advertisements within the field.