Report of visit to the
Computational Ecology and Visualization Laboratory
Michigan State University

October 16-18, 2000
Alan R. Bender, State Climatologist
South Dakota State University

The director of CEVL (http://www.cevl.msu.edu/), Dr. Stuart Gage, was my host during the visit. He is also the director of a new organization on the MSU campus that is an activity to promote cross-disciplinary projects. The MSU Signature Program in Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) has been given funding and a building to build and enterprise. The details of this enterprise are not yet ready for public disclosure but the building does contain the following centers of activity,

Computational Ecology and Visualization Laboratory
Upper Midwest Regional Earth Science Applications Center (RESAC)
Michigan Water Resources Research Institute
Basic Science and Remote Sensing Initiative

that will form the core of the projects that will be built around a systems approach to study of changes in land use systems.

The CEVL also is the entity that maintains linkages to other state, federal, and private partners. An example of the linkages is presented on their web page. The interesting thing about the organization is that compute science students represent the core of the computational work force in the laboratory. The laboratory provides tools and facilities for working scientist to share systems information on collaborative projects. The posters they display in the laboratory were very informative. One example project was a study of the movement of gypsy moth http://www.gypsymoth.ento.vt.edu/STS/ by atmospheric transport.

The enterprise has developed undergraduate courses in earth systems science and has an active program to develop external sources of funding for graduate research. One tool that has been developed to integrated the testing and using models is something that could be used to facilitate the development of activities in South Dakota.

The Modeling Applications Systems Integration Framework (MASIF) permits ecosystems to be modeled at scales from plots to regions. The framework is flexible enough so that many models can be incorporated into it and the results can be displayed in GIS presentation modules. Analysis of the model outputs and data inputs is facilitated by data mining tools that are part of the MASIF framework.

The North Central Regional Agricultural Experiment Station regional climate research project intends to use this tool to develop a regional climate atlas. I am the South Dakota representative to this group so it would be possible to utilize some of the products in a local development process. A possibility that was discussed is the incorporation of the atmospheric models for hydrological process that Dr. Capehart, SDSMT, is working on.

The LULCC has done a great deal of background work on putting together a multidisciplinary entity for research. They have incorporated the NASA RESAC into the organization. There is a great deal to be gleaned from the work that they are doing and the organizational structures they have develop to facilitate their intended activities.

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