QGreenland: Building a free interdisciplinary geospatial data environment for Greenland

Abstract:

Identifying, downloading, combining, and refining geospatial data often requires a significant time investment before a geoscientist can even begin the process of research and analysis. Interdisciplinary analysis is even more challenging given the difficulty in identifying and evaluating data outside one's domain of expertise. QGreenland, a new NSF EarthCube-funded project, is designed to remove these barriers for researchers and others involved in Greenland-focused exploration. QGreenland will be an open data Greenland GIS environment for use on the open source QGIS platform. Interdisciplinary data (e.g., biology, glaciology, infrastructure, etc.) is being curated by an international Editorial Board and developed into a unified, all-in-one GIS environment for fully offline or optional online use. While services and cloud technology are becoming more prominent, it is still important to produce tools for scenarios where bandwidth is limited or Internet access is completely unavailable – both common in Greenland - to assist broader user communities in discovering, visualizing, and analyzing Earth science data. Multiple levels of data will provide flexibility based on interest and use, including 1) a fully downloadable base package ready for offline use, 2) select downloads with disciplinary and/or high-resolution data extension packages for more in-depth analysis, and 3) online-access-only data layers that facilitate connection to near-real-time or especially large datasets. A QGreenland beta version is now available for exploration and a version 1 is slated for release in late 2020, with at least two subsequent annual updates. QGreenland will also be supported by a suite of how-to and curriculum material for those interested in using it for education or decision making. Open science is an emphasis of QGreenland and we have established a fully open source system that can allow other groups to also create unique, independent data packages. The workflow could also be modified for creating custom GIS data packages for other regions. We look forward to sharing the tool and discussing development methods, and we encourage direct experimentation with the beta version available at QGreenland.org.