Detecting change in ecosystems requires observations of living and non-living components over time. Many different organizations make observations that are relevant to understanding global change processes, but the data are often not easily discoverable by other interested scientists and managers. This project aimed to pull into a centralized location information about many of these observational networks. In this phase of the project, a publicly available web-based portal was developed that provides a means to discover, search, and connect to many types of environmental and biological data collected in the southeastern United States that are relevant to characterizing potential effects of climate and land use change on land, water, and wildlife.
The Global Change Monitoring Portal (GCMP) consolidates information about data resources from research and monitoring done by federal, state, tribal, local, and non-governmental organizations; it provides opportunities for discovery by users who are land managers, scientists, tribal and other leaders, decision-makers, and citizens. Data resources can be visualized and searched by categories of measurements made and/or by specific geographic criteria such as state, ecoregion, hydrologic unit, and Landscape Conservation Cooperative. The GCMP provides a mechanism to increase the usefulness of important data collection efforts by a broad range of organizations by making the data more accessible to users.
