Partners: Christopher Trisos, Cory Merow, Andreas Schwarz Meyer, and Ben Carlson
SSEC Engineers: Cordero Core, Niki Burggraff, Carlos Garcia Jurado Suarez, Ishika Khandelwal, and Anshul Tambay
Research Goals and Domain
As global temperatures rise, preserving biodiversity is essential for the planet’s health and human well-being. However, current biodiversity risk projections are often limited to a few snapshots of the future. As a result, decision-makers lack the necessary tools to design informed near-term conservation planning or adaptive management strategies, leaving gaps in addressing the urgent needs of biodiversity protection in a rapidly changing world. The Biodiversity Horizons project addresses these limitations by predicting the impacts of climate change over the next 1–10 years for tens of thousands of animal species and hundreds of thousands of plant species worldwide.
Software Problem
This approach capitalizes on recent advances in climate models, particularly around short-term temperature predictions, as well as innovations in processing large-scale biodiversity data. The compute power necessary to leverage these data begets adoption of high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud computing. Furthermore, the workflows presently exist as disparate R scripts.
Software Solution
The team at SSEC, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Cape Town, University College London, and the University of Connecticut, is developing an R-based software package to streamline these projections. This package can also be deployed through a corresponding Docker container with Apptainer and Singularity support. Designed to be deployed on scalable platforms, this software can be used on HPC clusters or in cloud environments. With this software, researchers will have the flexibility to customize local projections, schedule high-volume tasks on HPC, and leverage cloud resources as needed. This effectively enhances the adaptability and precision of their conservation efforts.
Impact
More updates are on the way!