USGCRP Global Change Information System Support for the SOCCR-2

Abstract:

The US Global Change Research Program’s (USGCRP’s) 2nd State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR-2) will be a highly influential scientific assessment like the 2014 National Climate Assessment (NCA) and contain global change information that will be transparent and traceable enabling reasonable reproducibility. The Global Change Information System (GCIS) was created by the USGCRP to provide specialists and the general public with accessible and usable global change information. An open-source web-based resource, GCIS provides human and programmable interfaces, relational and semantic representations of information, and discrete identifiers for various resources. GCIS’s capabilities demonstrated with the release of the NCA have been extended to support a set of USGCRP Global Change Indicators and will soon support the 2016 release of the Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health: A Scientific Assessment. When the SOCCR-2 is released, GCIS will serve as a scalable backend for the report’s web based version. GCIS will provide named sources and contacts for figures, images and data sources, with the provenance continuing to the platforms and instruments on which the report was based. By building on information from these previous activities, provenance information stored in GCIS will be a key factor in SOCCR-2’s transparency and traceability.