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There is a growing need for cyberinfrastructure to support science-based decision making in management of natural resources. In particular, our motivation was to aid the development of cyberinfrastructure for Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) for marine ecosystems. The IEA process involves analysis of natural and socio-economic information based on diverse and disparate sources of data, requiring collaboration among scientists of many disciplines and communication with other stakeholders. Here we describe our bottom-up approach to developing cyberinfrastructure through a collaborative process engaging a small group of domain and computer scientists and software engineers. We report on a use case evaluated for an Ecosystem Status Report, a multi-disciplinary report inclusive of Earth, life, and social sciences, for the Northeast U.S. Continental Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem. Ultimately, we focused on sharing workflows as a component of the cyberinfrastructure to facilitate collaboration and reproducibility. We developed and deployed a software environment to generate a portion of the Report, retaining traceability of derived datasets including indicators of climate forcing, physical pressures, and ecosystem states. Our solution for sharing workflows and delivering reproducible documents includes IPython (now Jupyter) Notebooks. We describe technical and social challenges that we encountered in the use case and the importance of training to aid the adoption of best practices and new technologies by domain scientists. We consider the larger challenges for developing end-to-end cyberinfrastructure that engages other participants and stakeholders in the IEA process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science research is increasingly computer and network enabled and referred to as e-science. The change has had an impact on the information environment in which scientists across disciplines operate to conduct their research. This paper reports on an NSF-funded project at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies (2007-2009) that examined this changing environment and directed specific attention to digital data management practices. A local faculty survey of data management practices and attitudes was conducted, as was a scan of related courses at peer institutions. Knowledge about data management in e-science was used to design a new course addressing data-related literacy for science students and teach them skills for managing data created as part of the scientific research process. Throughout the project, metadata proved to have a central role in how scientists operate in the e-science information environment and to be a key component of data literacy in the e-science environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, scientific projects require collaborative environments and powerful computing resources capable of handling huge quantities of data, which gives rise to e-science. These requirements are evident in the need to optimise time and efforts in activities having to do with health and biotechnology. Scientists are taking increasing interest in an emerging technology - Grid Information Technology (GRIT) - that may offer a solution to their current needs. The current work aims to survey how GRIT is being used in the three main economic areas in the world: Europe, Asia-Pacific and the USA. Furthermore, we propose an adoption model of GRIT that may be applied to new health/biotechnology research fields. The paper ends with a discussion on future directions and policy recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]