eHabitat, a multi-purpose Web Processing Service for ecological modelling

Abstract

The number of interoperable research infrastructures has increased significantly with the growing awareness of the efforts made by the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). One of the Social Benefit Areas (SBA) that is benefiting most from GEOSS is biodiversity, given the costs of monitoring the environment and managing complex information, from space observations to species records including their genetic characteristics. But GEOSS goes beyond simple data sharing, to encourage the publishing and combination of models, an approach which can ease the handling of complex multi-disciplinary questions. It is the purpose of this paper to illustrate these concepts by presenting eHabitat, a basic Web Processing Service (WPS) for computing the likelihood of finding ecosystems with equal properties. When chained with other services providing data on climate change, eHabitat can be used for ecological forecasting and becomes a useful tool for decision-makers assessing different strategies when selecting new areas to protect. Further enhanced by a discovery broker service, eHabitat can access virtually any kind of thematic data that can be considered as useful when defining ecosystems and their future persistence under different climatic or development scenarios. The paper will present the architecture and illustrate the concepts through a few case studies which forecast the impact of climate change on protected areas. A first prototype of this framework was successfully demonstrated at the GEO-VII Ministerial Meeting in Beijing, China, November 2010.JRC.H.5-Land Resources Managemen