Director’s Blog October 28, 2019
By Ian Billick, PhD

In alignment with the Strategic Plan, RMBL is making big investments in spatial data over the next few years, and we need your help in guiding this effort. The goal of this work is to create a data-rich environment for researchers, advancing spatially explicit environmental science that integrates field measurements and long-term monitoring efforts with a new generation of remote sensing tools.

Starting in January of 2020, RMBL has hired me (Ian Breckheimer) as a staff scientist to spearhead this work. Over the next few years I?m going to be working with the RMBL community to create a set of high-resolution maps that describe the microclimate, plant communities, biophysical template and ecosystem processes of the upper Gunnison basin. These datasets will be state-of-the-art, fully reproducible, and fully open to the research community to incorporate into proposals and publications. To help me prioritize my efforts and make these shared resources as useful as possible, I’m soliciting feedback from you all on the scope, form, and scale of these datasets. Basically I need to know what sorts of data products could give your research RMBL the biggest boost, and what forms those data products should be in to make them most useful to you and other members of your research group.To help structure feedback from the community, I’ve created a brief survey. The survey should take 5-10 minutes to complete, and asks you to prioritize different data products that I think are feasible to develop over the next few years. It also gives you a chance to make suggestions about additional products that might not be on my radar just yet, and how you would prefer to access these datasets.