RETOOLING COLLABORATION.

This article examines how environmental science is changing in ways that bring researchers, students, decisionmakers, and citizens closer than ever before, and identifies the need to build an infrastructure, both technological and human, that enables effective interaction among these groups. Why is such an infrastructure necessary? Local actions have global impacts, and global changes have local effects. Monitoring global and local indicators can be an effective way to assess the implications of environmental change and the effectiveness of strategies to manage it. But despite its promise, monitoring by itself is an incomplete solution; there must be a way to achieve synthesis of local environmental change into expressions of global impacts and to translate global processes into locally meaningful terms. Achieving this goal requires a new approach to scientific infrastructure and, specifically, infrastructure that supports scientific collaboration. To address these needs, one vision for collaborative environmental science uses an infrastructure based on new Internet technologies and the emerging "Semantic Web" to support interaction among scientists, decisionmakers, and stakeholders. The goal of this infrastructure is not to replace established forms of collaboration but to augment them with deeper interaction and with consensus-building techniques that bring advantages not available with traditional modes of communication. To be successful, however, this infrastructure must be designed around three characteristics of effective scientific collaboration: continuity, which enables communities to link local studies to larger problems, informality, which gives diverse groups a role in science, and ubiquity, which leverages Internet connectivity to achieve greater communication. INSETS: REAL-TIME ONLINE CONFERENCES BENEFIT STUDENTS;KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES AND PITFALLS;ASYNCHRONOUS DISCUSSIONS IN A DIVERSE CLIMATE-IMPACTS STUDY.