SKOPE: Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments

Understanding coupled human and natural systems is a major research focus for the social and natural sciences. Implicit in the concept of a coupled natural and human system is the mutual dependency of human societies and their natural environments. Scholars examining anything other than short intervals in recent decades can assume neither a stable environment nor that today’s environment was replicated in the past. They need environmental knowledge specific to their spatial-temporal problem contexts. However, in accounting for environmental change they are likely to find that state-of-the-art data on past environments are difficult to discover and even more difficult to integrate, process, and interpret.

SKOPE is an online resource for paleoenvironmental data and models. It enables scholars to easily discover, explore, visualize, and synthesize knowledge of environments in the recent or remote past. Given a location and temporal interval, SKOPE offers access to diverse sources of long-term, high-resolution environmental data. As a dynamic resource; it will allow users to rerun models with different inputs and it will seamlessly accommodate new datasets and models. SKOPE builds on vast amounts of prior data collection and previous research, transforming those into readily usable environmental knowledge.

SKOPE addresses two critical challenges to contemporary science: increasing access to publicly funded research; and ensuring that scientific results are transparent and reproducible. SKOPE will provide robust support for reproducible scientific research requiring paleoenvironmental data. It will not just enable discovery and access to paleoenvironmental data; it will provide researchers with an unprecedented ability to explore the data’s provenance–a detailed, comprehensible record of the origin and computational derivation of the supplied data. Central to SKOPE’s comprehensive support for transparency, reproducibility and provenance management will be the further development of YesWorkflow, a system for revealing the fine-grained provenance of data produced by scripts, programs, and computational pipelines without adapting software to run within a scientific workflow management system and without the overhead of a runtime provenance recorder.

SKOPE is conceived as a tool that can serve diverse professional and academic communities. For example, planners could use its long-term environmental reconstructions to investigate vulnerabilities in existing infrastructure that are outside the experience provided by the historic record. It could be used by archaeologists examining the social consequences of long-term climate changes, or ecologists investigating long-term changes in biodiversity or ancient species distributions. More broadly, it empowers investigations that rely on long-term environmental data.