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Minisymposium Presentation
Resisting Contextual Collapse through the iPlaces Platform: Data Trusts, High-Performance Computing, and Digital Twin Technology to Empower Local Communities
Presenter
Director of the Gump South Pacific Research Station, Neil Davies is also a Research Affiliate at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, and founding VP / Science Director of Tetiaroa Society. Based in French Polynesia since 2000, his research focuses on sustainability science and cyberinfrastructure, especially how biodiversity genomics can contribute to computational models of place. With the Island Digital Ecosystem Avatar (IDEA) Consortium, he is working to support Integrated Democratic Ecological Action, while establishing Moorea and Tetiaroa as the world’s best-known social-ecological systems. After graduating in Zoology from Oxford University, Davies received his Ph.D. in evolutionary genetics from University College London. In 2020, Davies co-founded the Blue Climate Initiative to advance ocean-related solutions to climate change. He serves on the board of the Genomic Standards Consortium and is co-author of the book “Biocode: The New Age of Genomics” (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Description
Field Stations advance our understanding of the physical, biogeochemical, ecological, social, and economic interactions that constitute place. Society has sophisticated ‘open science’ (OS)(cyberinfrastructure and progress is being made toward digital twins of Earth systems; yet local communities often feel disconnected from place-based scientific information and its benefits. One reason is that metadata describing samples/data collected in situ, including legal and social metadata that are vital for their reuse, can be stripped or lost in downstream applications. A novel publishing platform (iPlaces) creates a culture in which the common self-interest of all participants is clear to everyone. iPlaces enables field stations (and other anchor institutions) to publish project descriptions and related documentation in their station-branded journal. Using familiar peer review processes, station directors act as editors in a collaborative ecosystem that leverages OS data services, while empowering local communities to enter a dialogue with research teams. Benefits flow up and down value chains as: (1) place-based metadata are systematically layered onto research projects, (2) global OS infrastructure automatically applies this metadata to downstream research outputs, and (3) data trust services link outputs back to field stations and their communities. The power of this approach is discussed in a variety of contexts.