Speaker
Description
Detailed analysis
AquaMaps are very important resources for species assessment. These products are requested to document the large-scale and long-term presence of species in certain regions of the world. To produce such predictive maps two complementary procedures are needed. One is dedicated to estimating the probabilities of species occurrence by matching the species environmental envelope. The other is dedicated to the actual production of the maps by plotting the estimated values on Earth maps. Both procedures require computationally intensive crunching activities that fit well with the properties of the EGEE grid infrastructure. This contribution reports on the crunching activity for supporting the second procedure of AquaMaps production. It exploits a data source capturing the data of more that 9000 species and consisting of more than 50 million probability entries to produce millions of products. Each generated product consists of several images and is stored and accessed through a VRE.
Impact
AquaMaps is a service widely used within the biodiversity community as a basis for species distribution inference. The service is currently used by other large-scale services like FishBase serving approximately one million users per month. One of the AquaMaps bottlenecks is the time needed to generate the richness maps a scientist can be interested in by crunching data per species (or set of species) to produce aggregated view per Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family or Species. D4Science proposes a different approach consisting in (i) the exploitation of EGEE grid facilities to produce such maps and (ii) by relying on D4Science data management facilities, the provision to scientists of tools for searching the maps they are looking for. Actually, a new large community is starting to appreciate EGEE potentialities while scientists are provided with compound information objects containing additional data and multiple views of the maps, thus improving the resulting quality of service.
URL for further information
Project Web Site: http://www.d4science.eu
http://www.aquamaps.org/
Keywords
Richness Species Distribution Map Generation, D4Science, AquaMaps, Biodiversity
Conclusions and Future Work
The service resulting from the synergic use of D4Science and EGEE technologies to supply scientists with species distribution maps represents an effective enhancement for the biodiversity community since its users are provided with richer information in a shorter time period. This approach sets the scene for other experimentations including the exploitation of grid facilities to generate alternative estimation data (and maps) resulting from other (more complex) predictive models.