Coupling Cyberinfrastructure and Geographic Information Systems to Empower Ecological and Environmental Research.

The article presents information on the function of cyberinfrastructure in empowering ecological and environmental research. Cyberinfrastructure describes integrated information and communication technologies for distributed information processing and coordinated knowledge discovery, which promises to revolutionize the way that science and engineering are done in the 21st century and beyond. The National Science Foundation's TeraGrid--a key element of the U.S. and world cyberinfrastructure--has facilitated the development and operation of more than two dozen science and engineering gateways. Coupling cyberinfrastructure and geographical information system can facilitate computational thinking to analyze massive quantities of spatiotemporal data rapidly and economically.