University of California, Berkeley

The next generation of predictive models of the biotic response to environmental change must meet the challenge of incorporating the effects of complex interactions among organisms, climate, and their physical and biotic environments.  A great variety of data types are required to meet this challenge, including current and past species’ distributions, the increasing amount of associated data on their genotypes and phenotypes, and how these have changed in space and time, as well as empirical and modeled data on environmental and climate change.  The goal of this project is to develop a Predictive Biosystems Informatics Engine (PBIE), the informatics infrastructure needed to access, visualize, and analyze these rich data sets, thus providing the foundation for building the next generation of models of the biotic response to global change.  The unique combination of data in Berkeley’s Natural History Museums, Field Stations, and faculty labs, the University’s expertise in bioinformatics and the digitizing and serving of organismal and environmental data, and a world-class community of scholars and students make the unprecedented scale and complexity of the proposed effort possible.  The PBIE will innovate with cutting-edge technologies, and once operational, will enable cross disciplinary exploration of the vast and disparate data sources required to understand biotic response to global change.