Climate Scenarios Service Description The Lifemapper Climate Scenarios Service allows users to get a scenario or list scenarios that fit desired criteria.
Each scenario is a collection of related environmental layers. The relationship between the layers is usually defined by a time period for which the environmental layers are applicable, the organization that created the scenario, and if it is a future scenario, the prediction of the environmental scenario. This predicted scenario could be one which the impact of humans continues growing at the current rate, reduces, or remains constant and really anything else along that range. Getting a List of Scenarios If you call http://lifemapper.org/services/lm2/scenarios/xml with an HTTP GET request, a list of available scenarios will be returned.
The items returned in this list can be filtered using a number of url parameters. A full list of the available filter parameters can be found in the Lifemapper web services WADL document. You can get an idea of how the parameters work by visiting the listing service with a web browser. A form will be presented at the top of the page that will allow you to filter the results as well as display the filters used to generate that page of results.
A common way to use this service is to lookup which scenarios are compatible. This is particularly useful when you have determined what scenario you want to use to create a model and want to find out what scenarios you can then project that model on to. For this example, we will use the scenario with id 13 as our model scenario. We would then use the "matchingScenario" parameter to find out what scenarios we can use for projections. The resulting url will be:
http://lifemapper.org/services/lm2/scenarios/xml?matchingScenario=13 .
Another way this service can be used is to determine which scenarios are current vs. future. For that we need to use the "keyword" parameter. Current environmental scenarios use the keyword "observed" while future scenarios use the keyword "predicted". This url will return all of the observed scenarios:
http://lifemapper.org/services/lm2/scenarios/xml?keyword=observed .
while this url will return predicted future scenarios:
http://lifemapper.org/services/lm2/scenarios/xml?keyword=predicted .
The list of scenarios is available in a variety of formats. These formats do not contain the actual scenario data, just metadata about them.
Formats available: Getting an Individual Scenario You will need the scenario id number to return an individual scenario. You can browse the list of scenarios to find the scenario you would like, and just click the link.
Get an Individual Scenario Method explains in more detail how this service works.
Formats available: Posting a Scenario The post climate scenario page provides a form for entering scenario metadata and climate layer ids for the layers to be included in that scenario. If you don't want to use this form to upload a layer, you will need to provide the following parameters as url parameters:
- code - This is a short identifier for the scenario
- title - A title for the scenario
- author - The author of the scenario
- description - A longer description of the scenario
- startDate - The date measurements for the scenario began
- endDate - The date measurments for the scenario ended
- units - The units for the cell size for each layer
- resolution - The resolution of the cells of the raster layers
- keyword - A keyword for the scenario, this parameter can be repeated
- epsgCode - The epsg code of the projection of the rasters (Only 4326 and 2163 are supported currently)
- layer - The layer id of a layer to add to the scenario, this parameter can be repeated
Once your post request has been built, post it to: http://lifemapper.org/services/{user}/scenarios