Global Change Data Base

"The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Environmental Research Laboratory - Corvallis, Oregon (ERL-C), established an Interagency Agreement with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) in September 1990. This agreement began a five year cooperative effort to develop a geographic database for modeling terrestrial climatebiosphere interactions in support of EPA's Global Climate Research Program. Although performing specific tasks under contract to the US EPA, NGDC independently operates a Global Change Database Program (GCDP) as part of its NOAA mission Considerable synergism therefore exists between the tasks performed for the JPA under the "Global Ecosystems Database Project, '' and other activities supporting NOAA Climate and Global Change Program"--Preface

During the summer of 1987, a series of discussions I was held at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (nASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, to plan a study of global vegetation change. The work was aimed at promoting the Interna tional Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), sponsored by the International Council of Scientific Unions (lCSU), of which nASA is a member. Our study was designed to provide initial guidance in the choice of approaches, data sets and objectives for constructing global models of the terrestrial biosphere. We hoped to provide substantive and concrete assistance in formulating the working plans of IGBP by involving program planners in the development and application of models which were assembled from available data sets and modeling ap proaches. Recent acceptance of the "nASA model" as the starting point for endeavors of the Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems Core Project of the IGBP suggests we were successful in that aim. The objective was implemented by our initiation of a mathematical model of global vegetation, including agriculture, as defined by the forces which control and change vegetation. The model was to illustrate the geographical consequences to vegetation structure and functioning of changing climate and land use, based on plant responses to environmental variables. The completed model was also expected to be useful for examining international environmental policy responses to global change, as well as for studying the validity of IIASA's experimental approaches to environmental policy development.

The year 2010 was a landmark in the history of digital libraries because for the first time this year the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) and the annual International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL) were held together at the Gold Coast in Australia. The combined conferences provided an - portunity for digital library researchers, academics and professionals from across the globe to meet in a single forum to disseminate, discuss, and share their valuable - search. For the past 12 years ICADL has remained a major forum for digital library - searchers and professionals from around the world in general, and for the Asia-Pacific region in particular. Research and development activities in digital libraries that began almost two decades ago have gone through some distinct phases: digital libraries have evolved from mere networked collections of digital objects to robust information services designed for both specific applications as well as global audiences. Con- quently, researchers have focused on various challenges ranging from technical issues such as networked infrastructure and the creation and management of complex digital objects to user-centric issues such as usability, impact and evaluation. Simulta- ously, digital preservation has emerged and remained as a major area of influence for digital library research. Research in digital libraries has also been influenced by s- eral socio-economic and legal issues such as the digital divide, intellectual property, sustainability and business models, and so on. More recently, Web 2.