Collaborative Research: GEO OSE Track 2: QGreenland-Net: Open, connected data infrastructure for Greenland-focused geoscience, and beyond

This project will develop QGreenland-Net, a cloud-based geospatial data infrastructure for Greenland-focused research and education that builds on the existing QGreenland geographic information system (GIS) package. QGreenland-Net is motivated by U.S. and international strategic priorities to increase the usability and accessibility of Greenland-related data for research and decision-making. To address these needs, QGreenland-Net will build capacity for open data sharing, shared data services, and consistent standards across U.S.-, Greenland-, and Denmark-based data producers and geospatial software creators. QGreenland-Net will create open data services that simplify geospatial data integration, making it easier for researchers and managers to map, analyze, and model changes in the Greenlandic Arctic. This inherent support of data sharing is a key element of open data ecosystem creation that will arise from QGreenland-Net activities. The broader impacts of QGreenland-Net are far reaching, serving data creators, data users, geoscientific and interdisciplinary researchers, educators from high school through graduate school, and interested decision makers, planners, and communities. Free and open access is a key element of an open science ecosystem, and all QGreenland-Net development, tools, and support resources will continue to be open and free to access. QGreenland-Net will mobilize and deliver critical geospatial data resources for Greenland-focused research and education from sources that are currently highly dispersed, inaccessible, and not interoperable. The software created by QGreenland-Net will serve the full geospatial data community, and it will provide a replicable approach to data delivery that could be applied across Arctic science and the geosciences. At the heart of the QGreenland-Net project is a new NSF Arctic Data Center and QGreenland partnership to create an “Open Geospatial Data Cloud” (OGDC) to improve discoverability, accessibility, and interoperability for geospatial data from the DataONE federation of data repositories. Using these cloud resources, researchers and educators will be able to identify geospatial data of interest from the network of repositories, make data transformations, and then share, analyze, and visualize those data via QGreenland or other geospatial software. QGreenland-Net will coordinate across the Greenland research, open research software, and federated data communities to ensure interconnected data-to-application process development, and it will support sustained and networked growth of this new open science ecosystem through workshops, tutorials, and community-building. Introduction of an educator-specific QGreenland package will support teaching Polar science principles, and further development of enduring educational materials will allow teachers, students, and researchers to cultivate new capacity for geospatial data use and discovery. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.