Biomass-based bioenergy is recognized as one promising renewable energy source to meet the future energy demand of human society. Though biomass production on regional scales has been studied for decades, multi-scale analysis of biomass production remains a significant challenge to understand the constraints and potentials at national and global scales. This research addresses this challenge by developing geospatial data handling methods to enable geospatial analysis of massive spatial-temporal data that are related to climate dynamics and biomass production.
A web-based data portal is developed to synthesize multiple spatial-temporal data sources and make theses sources available through GISolve (www.gisolve.org) - the National Science Foundation TeraGrid GIScience Gateway. The data sources include crop yield data from USDA, solar radiation data from NOAA, and earth climate data from various sources. Data access is facilitated by information filtering software agents that are able to process heterogeneous data and metadata formats and various configurations of resolution, scales, and accuracies. The portal is developed as a GISolve component to support geospatial analysis of bioenergy through the use of cyberinfrastructure.
Project Team: Yan Liu, Eric Shook, Shaowen Wang (PI), Xinguang Zhu