Building cyberinfrastructure from the ground up for the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization introducing the cyberNABO Project

The cyberNABO Project is designed to solidify a developing multidisciplinary community through the development of cyberinfrastructure (CI) to study the long-term human ecodynamics of North Atlantic, a region that is especially vulnerable to ongoing climate and environmental change. It builds build upon prior sustained field and laboratory research, rich and diverse datasets, and a strong involvement by local communities and institutions. cyberNABO is currently hosting a series of workshops aimed at taking these collaborators and stakeholder communities to a new level of integration and to develop capacity for building CI and visualizations in subsequent funding cycles. Research on the long-term sustainability in the Arctic requires compiling data from over thousands of square miles, hundreds of years, and multiple disciplines, from climatology to archaeology to folklore. The complexity of datasets of this scale presents a unique challenge to create a CI system that results in interoperability and accessibility of data - a task that needs an explicit plan and extensive expertise from a variety of fields. Investing in a comprehensive CI system provides the opportunity to integrate collaborators and data from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, thus providing the opportunity for a holistic approach to long-term human ecodynamics in the context of rapid social and environmental change and for the creation of digital tools for expanded northern community involvement in global change research. In order to address questions of this scale, however, this collaborative group needs to integrate multiple sources, types, and formats of data to address multidisciplinary questions and provide effective support for visualization and modeling efforts that can connect knowledge systems.