January 14, 2014
Geneva, Switzerland
Organizer of official side event held in conjunction with the Group on Earth Observations Ministerial Plenary, sponsored by the United States of America and Australia & the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), the Open Geospatial Consortium and the GEOGLAM Community of Practice
Meeting Synopsis
In its fifth major meeting, a partnership focused on Knowledge Systems for Sustainability (KSS) assembled representatives of major projects and programs that generate, curate, and/or deliver data, information, tools, analytics, and knowledge assets relevant to sustainable landscape management. While social sciences and the social components of social-ecological systems are critical components of KSS, they were not a focus of this meeting. Future efforts will concentrate on these aspects of knowledge systems. This 1.5-day workshop mapped participants’ capabilities in relation to each other, reviewed cyberinfrastructure models from leading global efforts, and further mapped partners’ capacities into specific place-based natural resource management challenges or “cases,” using the U.S. Chesapeake Bay Program as an exemplar.
A major goal of this meeting was to foster targeted interactions among prospective partners with complementary capacity, and to emerge with expressions of interest and concrete agreements that take forward the KSS objectives. Resulting collaborations are anticipated to build defined pieces of knowledge systems, as we have conceived them (i.e., “prototypes”) that better support integrative, adaptive management of landscapes that are subject to provisioning demands. Progress was made in advancing specific “cases” that will be nested with the broader context of KSS activities.