Anticipatory Analytics for Environmental Stressors: An open community platform for accelerating environment and security research and development

Environment-security researchers and practitioners must overcome several technical challenges in the course of their efforts. In the absence of an open-community platform, each researcher or institution compiles and curates their own data repositories, analytical tools, and computational environments. This results in significant duplication of effort, limits the replication and validation of research, and diminishes the interoperability of analytic tools. These characteristics slow the pace of progress and innovation. However, there is often a high degree of commonality between independent efforts since they all face similar challenges. The purpose of this Phase II STTR effort is to address these common community needs by designing and implementing an open-source community platform for environment-security analysis. This platform will become a community venue with tools to: acquire and maintain frequently used environment-security datasets, harmonize and perform exploratory analysis on these disparate datasets, and perform integrated analyses. Furthermore, the open-source structure of the effort will encourage others to contribute components that will enhance the capabilities of the platform over time. Ultimately, this work will accelerate environment-security research and application by reducing barriers to entry, improving the replicability of research, enhancing interoperability between tools and methods, and facilitating interdisciplinary integration and analysis.