Achievement

A group of SCALE-IT trainees (Austin Milt, Christine Dumoulin, Nick Lineback, and Denise Koessler), under the guidance of a faculty mentor, decided to take on the challenge of providing adequate-sized data sets to ecosystems modelers so that they can suitable test theoretical models. To accomplish this task, the group created PEDO (Psuedo-real Ecological Data Online). PEDO is an algorithm that takes established real world data patterns and generates large-scale simulated data based on those patterns. The trainees are also setting up a website that will make the data generator wildly available to any ecosystem modelers. The hope is that PEDO will provide a more readily available and sufficiently large data set that will enable research to more quickly and reliably test models, which in turn will lead to more and better models for field application and policy work. The project combined the skills of two ecosystem modelers, a programming specialist, and a graph theorist.