CyVerse Hosts 2018 Earth Science Information Partners
The Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) 2018 summer meeting, Data for our Changing Earth: Realizing the Socioeconomic Value of Data, was held in Tucson July 17–20, with sponsorship by the University of Arizona.
ESIP director Erin Robinson shakes hands with University of Arizona Associate Vice President for Research Development John Mester at the ESIP 20th anniversary party, held at CyVerse headquarters at the UA’s Bioscience Research Laboratories. (Photo by Tyson Swetnam/CyVerse)
ESIP is a non-profit, volunteer organization that works to support the global Earth science data community by answering networking and data dissemination needs, linking observation, research, application, education, and use of Earth science information.
“ESIP is an important organization for sharing, standardizing, and managing science data,” noted Tyson Swetnam, a CyVerse science informatician who gave a plenary presentation about CyVerse’s data management and cloud sharing capabilities during the 2018 ESIP conference.
“Especially as CyVerse becomes more involved with large-scale imaging projects,
including field phenotyping and mapping geospatial to environmental data, ESIP is an important partner for managing data. As different institutions move into this space, CyVerse can be an effective initial tool to build into their infrastructure.” Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, ESIP is a collaboration among more than 110 organizations, including NASA, NOAA, and the USGS.
“ESIP represents a mature community of data and technology producers that have collaborated across boundaries,” noted Nirav Merchant, CyVerse co-principal investigator and director of the UA’s Data7 Data Science Institute and of biocomputing at the UA’s Arizona Research Laboratories.
The ESIP summer meeting featured updates on a variety of data management, Earth systems, and computational themes, data ownership and appropriate attribution, and other challenges undertaken by the diverse community of scientists and informaticians.
“Showcasing UA's leading-edge research in earth systems, informatics, and information science at the ESIP summer meeting in Tucson was a highlight not just for their 300-plus members, but for our own scientists as well,” said UA Vice President for Research Kimberly Ogden. “The scope of this research is an ideal fit with ESIP's theme of "Making Data Matter Together.”
UA plenary speakers in addition to Swetnam included: Jon Chorover and Bill Smith (College of Agriculture and Life Sciences), Stephanie Rainie (Public Health, Native Nations Institute), Bryan Heidorn and Gretchen Stahlman (Social and Behavioral Sciences, iSchool), Chris Guiterman (Laboratory of Tree Ring Research), and Rowena Davis (Belmont Forum, Arizona Geological Survey).
Photos by Tyson Swetnam/CyVerse.