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About the Deltas Change (D²) Project

NOAA's Earth Science Data and Information Management Program funded a proposal in FY03 to explore new informatics concepts and needs for supporting "integrated science and assessments." The project was called the "Regional Ecosystems Assessment Data (READ) Project."

The idea behind READ was that new understanding of management from an ecosystem perspective is now required and part of official policy and strategic designs in most Federal agencies with natural resource programs. This is commonly referred to as "ecosystem-based" or just "ecosystem" management. To support ecosystem-based management, one requires ecosystem science, which itself is a relativly new field with many unknowns. Prior to adopting the idea of ecosystem science and ecosystem-based management most approaches focused on habitat management (e.g., conservation of wetlands). Before that the focus was on population management (e.g., threatened, endangered, managed, or other species of interest). Before that it was primarily on yield and harvesting (e.g., the fur trade). This has been a natural evolution of thinking from the very specific human requirement to the larger systems that are needed to support those requirements.

But as we turn attention to larger or more inclusive systems in order to understand or control the outcome in specific ways, we encounter a very interesting phenomenon that is only recently receiving serious attention in the sciences. That phenomenon is complexity. As we shift from studying and attempting to manage specific and definable parts or outcomes of a system, to studying and attempting to manage whole systems, we also move from well-defined quantities and concepts to highly entangled relationships, webs and networks, hierarchies and holarchies, and mutual feedbacks between multiple parts of the system to another. This is complexity. In the ecological literature it is implicit in the phrase "the whole is more than the sum of its parts."

Complexity causes problems for science. It introduces many uncertainties and confounds predictive techniques. New fields of mathematics have opened up to deal with aspects of complexity. The work is far from complete.

Dealing with complexity also implies changes in the organization and kind of information that science and management may need. Since our understanding of complex ecosystems is as yet poor, there is also quite a bit of uncertainty in what information is needed and how it should be organized. Are there more appropriate information structures for dealing with complexity than the ones we have been using to date? The answer seems to be that there must be, because many of the previous information designs do not help us answer the current questions. This has given rise to another new field called "informatics," and specifically "ecosystem informatics."

Ecosystem informatics refers to the entire enterprise of acquiring and providing useful information for understanding and managing ecosystems. Its standards, models, and methods are still being developed. It is the topic of a series of National workshops. One thing we know is that ecosystem informatics will have a close relationship with emergent information technologies, particularly those associated with networks and systems such as the Internet. In a sense, while we are discovering the natural complexity of ecosystems, we are also discovering new complexities of information.

NOAA has launched a number of new strategic science and management programs aimed at the ecosystem level. These exist in the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the National Ocean Service (NOS), Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), and the Office of Global Programs (OGP) which supports Global Climate Change programs and the Regional Integrated Science and Assessments (RISA) Program. There are also many other line offices and programs in NOAA, other agencies, governments, and international bodies. The National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) is tasked with providing data and information for NOAA programs, users, and collaborators. Hence, NESDIS must understand and even anticipate the needs of NOAA's science and management programs. This was the explicit purpose of the READ project - to explore new ecosystem informatics in a pilot/demo mode.

READ became aligned from 1993-1994, while waiting for funding, with an effort of the Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS) to specify new requirements for coastal observing and to demonstrate early examples. Through three international meetings an agenda for action regarding the ecosystem perspective was developed, and because of current phenomena of interest, data availability, and collaboration with data providers a focus on world deltas was adopted as a recommended start-up project. READ thus combined its purpose with that of Coastal GTOS. The result was that the C-GTOS Implementation Plan, finalized in December of 2004, recommends development of a world deltas pilot project aimed as new concepts in ecosystem informatics. The READ project, which received funding for work completing in February, 2004, has thus contributed to and benefited from the C-GTOS definition process in very significant ways, establishing its main activity as a C-GTOS aligned "Deltas Change Project." Even as the C-GTOS report is being released in final form, READ has already realized one of its recommendations in the establishment of the World Deltas Network and Database.