EPIIC: The Future of Ecological Data Distribution

YERC is excited to have formed a coalition with Microsoft, Topcoder, Amphora, and Montana State University’s Computer Sciences Department to innovate ways to curate, present, and deliver essential ecological data via an internet platform called the Ecosystem Prognosis, Impacts, and Information Cooperative, or EPIIC. Each coalition member provides complementary skills, technology and expertise to jointly build the first Internet of Things for Nature ( IoT - Nature). It is befitting to build the world’s first IoT for Nature in the region surrounding the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem which includes the world’s first national park and our nation’s first forest reserve. YERC’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Robert (Bob) Crabtree hired Roby Roberts in 2018 as YERC’s new Chief Technology Officer to lead the coalition’s effort. Roberts, an experienced data scientist, who was formerly at Oracle, helped pioneer the construction of cloud computing systems.

Linked to the central hub of this newly formed coalition organizations are agencies, academic institutions, and concerned citizens that provide key ecological data to fuel EPIIC. The community science approach builds trust in the data so that it becomes useful information to aid natural resource decision-making. EPIIC also fuels what Crabtree calls community science where concerned individuals from all stakeholders work together and bear witness to the collection, storage, processing, and dissemination of key diagnostics of ecosystem health. EPIIC will provide easy and transparent access to anyone who shares concern for the changing impacts in the GYE region can either degrade, sustain, or recover ecosystem health. People combined with technology—both tried and true conservation measures and the latest technologies—will help remove barriers to allow informed decision-making and conservation success in the GYE.

“The Boiling River”Photo Credit: Owen Robbins — “The Boiling River”
Photo Credit: Owen Robbins

Easy access and effective presentation of sensor data and its analysis results will allow us to sustain our natural resources and healthy ecosystems by making time-sensitive, informed decisions in today’s changing world. Sensors are both human—citizen scientists armed with cell phone apps—or literally thousands of electronic sensors that monitor wildlife, water, and our ever-changing terrestrial landscapes from the ground, drones, planes, and satellites. By collaborating with organizations that have broad expertise and reach, YERC plans to enhance data distribution to all stakeholders while developing a community science cooperative model aimed at increasing the trust and use of valuable ecological data. These innovations act as early warning indicators (diagnostics) that continually monitor ecosystem health.

Critical to developing trust in the current ‘age of misinformation’ is open and transparent access to highly valuable information. Furthermore, our multi-party coalition designed EPIIC to allow individuals and stakeholder groups to contribute data. When all parties are involved in, and bear witness to, the collection, analysis, and dissemination of data, it becomes trusted information—something we critically need today. EPIIC is further designed to disseminate long-term research and monitoring results to quantify the human and climate impacts to our rivers, vegetation, soil, and wildlife. This diagnostic analysis leads to prognoses for ecosystem health which is directly related to human health because we rely upon a supply of natural resources to survive.

YERC’s partners allow EPIIC to function at a larger scale than would be typically possible for a small science-based nonprofit organization. Topcoder, a recognized leader in crowdsourcing with an impressive list of clients, from NASA, to Harvard Medical School, to Eli Lilly and Company, is critical to this effort. Consistency in providing high quality deliverables to clients and access to great projects for developers enabled Topcoder to cultivate a community of 1.5+ million members from around the world. Topcoder is donating their services for the project and are inspired by the volunteers from around the world who have stepped up to contribute skills to sustain one of our planet’s iconic ecosystems.

According to Nate Brougher, a manager on Topcoder’s Service Innovation team, “What excites me about this project is seeing Topcoder community members from all over the world contributing their talents and time because they see the profound impact that a platform like EPIIC can have by enabling users to diagnose, predict, prevent, or mitigate the effects of ecosystem problems with data-driven insights”. With the help of the Topcoder community, the YellowstoneNET initiative will have the ability to influence policy decisions, inform corporate actions, and involve the community in decisions made for the health of our ecosystem.

YERC is also thrilled to partner with Amphora Data for crucial components of the technical infrastructure behind EPIIC. Amphora is a data storage and integration platform for real-time data processing and third-party collaboration in a scalable and secure cloud environment—all designed for data-sharing. This company, co-founded by Australian entrepreneurs Rian Finnegan and Isaac Donnelly, aims at improving data collaboration across research, agriculture, and ecology. The Amphora data-sharing platform will host EPIIC data storage, curation, and retrieval for the many applications and predictive models being built to now to test and further develop EPIIC. As well as recently collected field and sensor data in 2019 and 2020 being integrated into EPIIC. According to Finnegan, Amphora’s software specialist, “One of the reasons we founded Amphora is that we wanted to find ways to tackle these big land use issues (biodiversity loss, climate change, topsoil erosion etc), but neither of us are farmers nor ecologists. We realised that we could play a part by building tools that can be used by others, and in turn enhance their collaborative capability. And that's the beauty of collaboration—each person brings their own unique experience and perspective, and together you can build something that none could achieve on their own”. This platform enables users to register on the Amphora website, granting access to view and download published EPIIC data. Collaboration between YERC and Amphora enables EPIIC to achieve its primary goal of distributing and sharing key ecological data to the hands of policy-makers, YERC stakeholders, outdoor enthusiasts, agencies, and landowners--all laiden with the responsibility of decision-making in a preventative, timely manner that sustains the biodiversity we rely upon.

Screenshot of YERC Data Overview – Amphora Data Exchange

Central to YERC’s YellowstoneNET initiative is sponsoring three MSU computer science senior capstone projects, with five talented students working with our private industry partners to create the EPIIC ‘engine’ of YellowstoneNET. According to John Paxton, Department Chair of Computer Sciences at MSU, “YERC is providing wonderful capstone projects for five MSU computer science majors. The projects provide these students with the opportunity to work on an important interdisciplinary problem while improving their data science skills”.

With the help of the following strategies, YERC is able to successfully collect, host, and distribute information and data that is crucial to the health of our ecosystem. This ease of distribution enables YERC to keep its decision makers, stakeholders, and community well informed.

One strategy uses cloud-based services to design, create and execute important processing on data streams such as water temperature, discharge, and nutrients. According to Roby Roberts, YERC’s Chief Technology Officer, these processes efficiently apply statistical methods of identifying trends and outliers in ecological data, as well as providing an early warning alert system for freshwater resource issues. Real-time processing of near real-time river and stream data is even more valuable in conjunction with other data sources, such as wildlife crossing monitors, wildlife cameras, soil moisture sensors, meteorological instruments, well depth measurements, and snow characteristics, which EPIIC will also include.
The second project under development incorporates readily available datasets including those from NASA satellites (30m Landsat, 500m MODIS imagery from Google Earth) with data from private drones. Rapid drone deployment provides incredible opportunities to inform land-use practices due to the near real-time availability of these datasets on the EPIIC platform. Publicly available satellite imagery is often years old, whereas near real-time drone data represents current conditions, encouraging preventative action and adaptive decision-making. With the help of trained machine learning classifiers, this program has the ability to create maps of current conditions such as land cover, soil, vegetation, and water. In addition, informed classifiers will analyze trends, and short-term forecasts. With the help of MSU, YERC is creating a process which can be applied to a variety of datasets including daily snow cover and temperature. This process will also enable YERC to gather more accurate water, wetland, and riparian area measurements in order to better understand water quantity and quality in the Upper Yellowstone River watershed. The quantity and quality of water is determined by establishing seasonal baselines, charting annual trends, and identifying changing conditions, all of which could be more accurately measured using the near real-time data offered by satellite imagery and private drones.
Cloud-based software is being developed that quickly and concisely classifies aquatic insects from standardized riverbed samples. These samples are collected from the Yellowstone River, and its tributaries. This program will serve as a new source of data for YERC’s existing RiverNET database which focuses on monitoring water quality and quantity. Roby Roberts, YERC Chief Technology Officer, explains that this program aims at developing an image detection algorithm, integrating the models into a mobile app, and pushing the data from the app into the RiverNET database in the cloud. These essential cloud computing resources have been granted to YERC by Microsoft’s AI for Earth program. Microsoft’s AI for Earth program expands the benefits of cutting-edge software beyond the business realm by putting “Microsoft cloud and AI tools in the hands of those working to solve global environmental challenges”. This program's main objective is preserving earth's ecosystems by creating a Planetary Computer which will have the capabilities to build an interconnected network of environmental data and tools. As part of the AI for Earth program, YERC utilized grants that have provided our nonprofit with Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing service offered by Microsoft that excels at building and managing cloud-based applications and services. This process represents a leap forward in efficiently including biological data in decision making about rivers, which is typically informed by physical or chemical properties.

Thanks to the contribution of these five computer sciences students and our coalition, YERC’s new and innovative programs aid in the process of recording and delivering EPIIC data. With this initiative, ecological data becomes an unbiased starting point to forge successful conservation efforts, make informed policy decisions, improve agricultural practices, or better understand the ‘well-normal state’ of a large ecosystem in which we recreate.

Dr. Robert Crabtree, YERC Chief Scientist

Peter Obermeyer, YERC Outreach Coordinator

Alexa Jorgenson, YERC Marketing Intern