Collaborative Research: GEO OSE Track 2: Sustainable Open Science Tools to Democratize Use of 3D Geomaterial Data

The climate crisis and its human impact have created an urgent need to curate and analyze a wide range of geosciences data. Characterizing geomaterials in terms of their microstructural and transport properties is crucial for Earth system understanding and for sustainable resource management. The structure and composition of soil play a foundational role in plant, microbial, and agricultural ecosystems. Deeper below the soil, rock microstructure and mineral heterogeneity are critical to understanding fluid/solid reactions to improve groundwater resources management, carbon sequestration, rare-earth mineral recovery, and contaminant transport. Modern 3D imaging provides a window to the microstructure of soil and rocks; recent advances in machine learning and simulation can improve our understanding of how these materials influence the world around us. A wealth of volumetric datasets of geomaterials at different length scales are available, but most are not broadly accessible due to gaps in the infrastructure required to curate and analyze them. As computational and data workflows become increasingly complex, there is a clear need to develop and maintain reproducible and scalable open science infrastructure to support scientific communities. This project will create cloud-based open science tools for curation and analysis of geomaterial image data. The benefits will reach geoscientists as well as a wide-ranging community of scientists working on diverse porous materials. Developed modules will be directly applicable to materials science (solid foams), chemical engineering (fuel cells, electrodes), and medicine (bones, cell biology, micro-vascular networks). The tool suite will be deployed with corresponding training and educational materials through a repository, Digital Rocks Portal (DRP), which has curated data available for reuse. Resources will be open and modular so users can adapt and implement them in diverse computing environments. Analysis workflows will be tested using image data across multiple scales from an ocean drilling project (NSF award 2140397). Use cases will be redistributed among the wide community of users of the NSF-sponsored University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography facility (UTCT). Students and researchers working on this project will be exposed to interdisciplinary work combining geology, engineering, data curation and computer science. The DRP will continue to be used in courses at multiple universities, and the tools created will be published with digital object identifiers (DOIs) and presented at conferences and training events. 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.