Lifemapper comprises two primary goals: the construction and
maintenance of an extensive predicted species habitat map
archive, and the exposure of spatial data and analysis services
based on this archive. We achieve these goals with a variety of
open source software and standards.
The bulk of the project is written in Python. The database underlying the project is
Postgres
spatially enabled with
PostGIS. Spatial data analysis is done with
GDAL (raster data) and
OGR (vector data).
Mapserver renders
spatial data to our website and webservices via
OGC standards WMS,
WFS, and WCS.
The architecture of the Lifemapper project consists of three
independent elements. Lifemapper
implements the
openModeller species niche
modeling platform on a cluster of 64 Intel computer nodes with
128 processors and a museum data pipeline to build a
global geospatial data archive of predicted species distributions.
The first element, openModeller, is running as a REST webservice
on our compute
cluster. This webservice creates species niche models and
projects them onto environmental scenarios. The openModeller
project provides a number of fundamental niche modeling
algorithms as plug-ins, including GARP, Climate Space Model,
Bioclimatic Envelopes, and others. Additional algorithms are
planned for the future. It is currently being developed by
Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental
(CRIA), Escola Politécnica da USP (Poli), and
Instituto
Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE).
The compute cluster has 64 nodes and 128 processors with 2
terabytes of local storage. The cluster is built with
Rocks,
an open-source Linux cluster distribution.
Sun Grid Engine (SGE) accepts, schedules, and manages remote
execution of Lifemapper niche modeling experiments on the nodes,
plus manages and schedules allocation of distributed resources.
The second element of Lifemapper is the workhorse of the project
- the data pipeline. The pipeline assembles niche modeling
experiments, dispatches them to the openModeller webservice,
retrieves the results, and catalogs them. This is the
element that builds and maintains our archive.
The third element of Lifemapper is the Spatial Data Library
(SDL). This is not only an archive of all the input spatial
data used in creating the habitat
maps, but also a catalog of the resulting niche model maps.
Data in the SDL is publicly available via REST webservices for
the metadata and OGC services for the spatial data. The website
provides a mechanism for browsing the archive and exploring
environmental data, species occurrence points, and niche model
maps while webservices
built on the archive are targeted at researchers who would like
to programmatically query, analyse, and download the data produced.
These elements make up the Lifemapper project. They can operate
in tandem or independently: each element could be replaced by a
comparable service or application for a similar output, or
incorporated into a new application with unique objectives.