Berkeley Ecoinformatics Engine

Predicting biotic responses to global environmental change necessitates a holistic understanding of the complex interactions and feedbacks among organisms, climate, and their physical and biotic environments across space and time. This level of understanding can only be achieved through the integration and analysis of diverse data types spanning a range of biological, spatial, and temporal scales.

The Berkeley Ecoinformatics Engine (http://ecoengine.berkeley.edu), provides an open Application Programming Interface (API) for researchers to explore, visualize, and analyze a wealth biological and geospatial information on global change, agnostic to software platform. It also liberates and integrates highly complex data from specimens in natural history museums, field experiments & observations, aerial and satellite imagery, measurements from environmental sensor networks, and global change model predictions.

The Ecoengine aims to be a model for informatics that promotes reproducible and open science across domains. We create web-based building blocks to access data from established repositories while promoting best practices to uncover ‘dark’ datasets from orphaned or remote labs. Our architecture is structured to promote use of the biodiversity and environmental datasets in data driven, transparent platforms. We welcome developers and researchers of all skills to use the Ecoengine tools and hopefully be inspired to create their own with Ecoengine-based applications.