Wednesday, September 23, 2009
On Friday morning more than thirty people gathered in the commons at Spooner Hall to watch the announcement of a $6 million project the University of Kansas will be participating in the next three years. The crowd was made up of faculty and students from the University of Kansas, Kansas State University and Rep. Dennis Moore (D-Kan.), who helped bring the grant to Kansas.
The grant will be split between the ecology and evolutionary biology departments of the University of Kansas, Kansas State university, the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University. It will fund the creation of a “cybercommons,” a collective computer system used to process and provide data to researchers from all four schools in real time.
Leonard Krishtalka, director of the Biodiversity Institute in Dyche Hall, said the cybercommons would have a profound impact on the way research data was handled and what can be done with it. The information gathered in research at all four schools will be run through several steps of analysis. This analysis will allow scientists to study ecological trends and predict their outcomes. This information could be about the spread of animals, insects or diseases. It could also be the impact of climate change.
Before this grant, sharing and processing of the collective data of these universities was limited by the existing technology. The cybercommons funded by this grant should help make the process easier and more capable.
The cybercommons, because it is Web-based, will make the information available to schools across the country.
“This opens up a terrific opportunity for reaching many more schools,” Krishtalka said, “both rural K-through-12 all the way to universities in major cities.”
The grant was provided through the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, which is a program of the National Science Foundation. The program was started in 1979 to help research universities remain competitive with those that generally receive more funding like those in California and Massachusetts.
Kristin Bowman-James, project director for EPSCoR in Kansas, said this particular grant required the cooperation of two states to share and collaborate on research. She said the decision of who to work with was easy.
“Because of the strong research here and in Oklahoma for ecological forecasting and because this type of research uses large databases it was a no-brainer to link these schools,” Bowman-James said.
The use of this system goes beyond the study of local plains. Josh Campbell, graduate research assistant at the Kansas Biological Survey, said he planned on using his experience with the project in other countries after he finished his degree.
“I’d like to take this same concept and apply it to humanitarian affairs,” Campbell said, “Bring together different non-governmental organizations and relief agencies using the same set of technologies.”
The grant will also create positions for more graduate students within the Biodiversity Institute.
— — Edited by Tim Burgess
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