Collaborative Research: Sustained Resources: OpenTopography - An AI-ready Cyberinfrastructure Facility for Advancing Our Understanding of a Changing Earth

This project will continue the development and operations of the OpenTopography (OT) cyberinfrastructure platform to provide seamless web-based access to topographic data from technologies such as lidar, along with processing tools and education and training resources. With the most comprehensive collections of topographic data on the internet, OT enables fundamental geoscience discoveries and innovative applications with societal value addressing hazards, resilience, and education. Centralized access to high resolution topographic data provides a baseline of the Earth’s surface, vegetation, and built environment, and furthers geoscientific knowledge, advances education, and broadens societal impacts. Open-access topographic data offer great potential to increase resiliency in communities that lack resources to mitigate natural hazards. OT’s education, community engagement, workforce development, and governance are designed to ensure broad and active participation. OT will advance science and education for the broader academic community and provide a comprehensive platform for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) topography data management, publication, and citation. The OT platform will support new artificial intelligence and machine learning use cases as well as additional capabilities for facilitating trustworthy and reproducible science. OT will enable new topographic data processing capabilities over larger spatial areas and across broader time spans, enabling wide use of OT across Earth science domains and educational levels. OT will expand knowledge of topography data to new communities and support workforce development via a multi-tiered plan including collaboration with community college faculty. Education and outreach activities include webinars, educational videos on topography, in-person short courses at national meetings, and entry-level undergraduate curriculum developed in collaboration with community college faculty. This award by the Geoinformatics Program in the Division of Earth Sciences is jointly supported by the National Discovery Cloud for Climate initiative within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. 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.