Hypothetical scope of the WATERS Network. |
As population levels and the rate of urban development rise, our society grows increasingly concerned with balancing the need to maintain water supplies of adequate quantity and quality for human use with preserving the integrity of aquatic ecosystems. Common practices associated with modern living often negatively impact the environment. Commercial fertilization of agricultural fields can result in significant run-off of nutrients and microorganisms into nearby surface waters. In some U.S. cities, untreated stormwater, containing substantial loadings of pathogens and chemicals, is discharged into the nearest body of water. And along some major U.S. rivers, drinking water intakes are located downstream from wastewater treatment plants. Because many of these issues are tied to where people live and work, scientists and engineers must also factor in social and economic impacts when considering solutions to these problems.
The goal of CLEANER, the Collaborative Large-Scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research, is to transform and advance the scientific and engineering knowledge base in order to address the challenges of complex, large-scale, human-stressed environmental systems. To understand these complex situations, scientists and engineers need to collect and integrate real-time data from watersheds, rivers, estuaries, coasts and cities throughout the country, and environmental engineers must integrate information from the laboratory or a single field site with information from larger, more geographically diverse observatories. It is only now, with the advent of grid computing, new data-mining techniques, and novel wireless sensors, that researchers are in a position to answer cutting-edge questions about hydrologic and environmental phenomena.
"CLEANER is primarily focused on water in all its forms," explains Barbara Minsker from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, principal investigator of the CLEANER Project Office. "To study and understand the state of water in the United States, we will have to use many types of data that have different scales, units, formats, quality and levels of uncertainty. Creating cyberinfrastructure that helps our community to find, obtain, transform, analyze and assimilate these data into many types of models is both a great challenge and a great opportunity."
As early as 2001, scientists and engineers discussed the need for a large-scale environmental research network that would enable them to better understand human-stressed environmental systems, their stressors, and the links between them. The idea of CLEANER evolved over the next four years, and in July 2005 the U.S. National Science Foundation awarded $2 million to a coalition of 12 institutions, led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to establish the CLEANER Project Office. The project office is co-directed by Minsker, Charles Haas of Drexel University and Jerald Schnoor of the University of Iowa.
Recognizing that the study of the aquatic ecosystem cuts across scientific disciplines, the CLEANER project office works with the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. to develop a dual-purpose network called WATERS, the Water and Environmental Research Systems Network. By July 2007, CUAHSI and the CLEANER Project Office will produce an environmental engineering and hydrologic science research plan that identifies cutting-edge scientific questions that may be addressed by the WATERS Network, and lays out an overall network design that includes research and education plans, timelines, milestones, and the scope of facilities, resources and research required. Ultimately, the plan will lay the foundation for a new infrastructure that will transform the way both environmental research and environmental education are conducted.
"The CLEANER Project Office's current mission is to work with the environmental science and engineering, social science, education and CUAHSI communities to define the WATERS Network," says Minsker. "We will be forming a community consortium that will propose and manage the network. The preliminary WATERS program plan will be ready in 2007, followed by preparation of a project execution plan in 2008 and, if the project is funded, construction will begin in 2011."
For more information on CLEANER (and the WATERS Network) and to sign up for the CLEANER quarterly newsletter, go to http://cleaner.ncsa.uiuc.edu.
—Jami Montgomery, CLEANER
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