Developing novel computational tools and methods to predict and mitigate the rapid changes occurring in the earth’s life support systems.
Understanding the earth’s life support systems, and predicting and mitigating the rapid changes that are occurring in these systems because of human activities is one of the great global scientific challenges humanity is currently facing. The programme in ecological and environmental sciences aims to contribute to meeting this challenge by working with the scientific community to identify critical problems and develop novel computational methods and tools for addressing these problems. Problems range from the management and integration of the ever-expanding body of ecological and environmental data to developing novel data analysis and visualization methods to developing advanced predictive models of biotic and coupled biotic and physical systems at scales from local to global.
In tackling scientific problems in these areas, we face a broad range of technological challenges, including computational modeling of complex systems, integrating models and data, data acquisition and management, visualization techniques, and tool usability, maintainability and extensibility.
Our scientific research is grouped into four Research Units:
We also undertake specific research in Synthesis and Integration of Ecological Theory:
- Connecting ecological sub-disciplines
- Furthering our understanding of the connections between ecological systems with other components of the earth system.
To facilitate the above research, and computational ecology more widely, we develop:
Computational Science Lab
