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The U.S. Geological Survey has studied the Colorado River Basin for a long time, and the result is a lot of material that does not talk to itself: more than 840 publications, 575 data releases and 330 project web pages, held in separate systems, repositories and local offices. The data come in every shape — discrete samples, continuous gauges, aerial and satellite imagery, geophysics, maps — collected at different places, times and scales. Putting them together to answer one question about drought takes more than reading them side by side.
The USGS project called ASIST (Actionable and Strategic Integrated Science and Technology) wrote a plan for that problem. It is a plan about information management technology: the shared computing, storage and data services the whole agency can use, so that a hydrologist, an ecologist and a geophysicist working on the same river can combine their work without rebuilding the plumbing each time. The agency's 21st-Century Science Strategy asks for exactly this kind of shared capability.
The plan sets out its steps in two phases — a year of planning, then four of building. Nothing in it is specific to the Colorado: the same steps would serve an integrated study anywhere.
Planning, fiscal year 2021
The first year produced a technology framework for scientists from different disciplines working together on drought.
Step 1 — take stock and ask around. List the science questions in the basin, the resources and expertise the USGS already has, and the gaps. Invite researchers inside and outside the agency working on similar problems, and discuss how new work could plug into the agency's shared tools.
The shared tools already available to projects in the basin:
| Kind | Tools |
|---|---|
| Computing | high-performance and high-throughput computing, edge computing for sensors, developer and production environments |
| Data | data hubs, portals and catalogues, storage and backup, trusted digital repositories, large file transfer |
| Analysis | analysis and visualization, GIS, artificial intelligence, machine learning |
| Hosting | infrastructure, platform and software as a service; website hosting |
Step 2 — try it on real questions. ASIST funded short-term studies of drought in the basin, each combining several disciplines, and used them to see where the technology helped. Their goals: workflows that handle the computing, storage and visualization a problem needs; machine learning to make USGS and partner monitoring networks easier to use; measurable gains in how data move between the USGS and its partners; and a roadmap for using the agency's full set of tools. The studies are mapped, with summaries, at apps.usgs.gov/colorado-river-basin.
Implementation, fiscal years 2022 to 2026
Over four years the plan builds the framework, widens it to data from outside the USGS, refines it, and then uses it to deliver science people can act on.
| Step | Goal | Work |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | Build the framework | test it on integrated projects in the basin; build knowledge graphs of how data, models and people connect; work with the agency's Semantic Web Working Group on making models and data reusable |
| 4 | Take in outside data | automate fetching data and models from trusted repositories and partners; use machine learning on partner monitoring systems |
| 5 | Refine | finish a data hub of agency datasets linked to trusted partner repositories; measure the time it saves |
| 6 | Finalize | settle the framework with IT leads, science-support offices and communities of practice; keep training people to use it |
| 7 | Deliver | publish best practices for sharing integrated results, use visualization to show findings from several disciplines at once, and hand the results to the people managing the river |
The bet underneath the plan is simple: the science on drought in the Colorado River Basin already exists in pieces, and the fastest way to more useful answers is to make those pieces easy to put together.
Sources
Written from U.S. Geological Survey Colorado River Basin Actionable and Strategic Integrated Science and Technology (ASIST) — Information Management Technology Plan, USGS Fact Sheet 2022–3051, a work of the United States government in the public domain. It cites the USGS 21st-Century Science Strategy 2020–2030 (Circular 1476, doi.org/10.3133/cir1476).
Lizenz: CC0 1.0 (gemeinfrei) · Bearbeitet nach pubs.usgs.gov
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