Supporting environmental modelling with Taverna workflows, web services and desktop grid technology

Ecosystem functioning, climate change, and multiple interactions among biogeochemical cycles, climate system, site conditions and land use options are leading-edge topics in recent environmental modelling. Terrestrial ecosystem models are widely used to support carbon sequestration and ecosystem studies under various ecological circumstances. Our team uses the Biome-BGC model (Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group, University of Montana), and develops an improved model version of it, called Biome-BGC MuSo. Both the original and the improved model estimate the ecosystem scale storage and fluxes of energy, carbon, nitrogen and water, controlled by various physical and biological processes on a daily time-scale. Web services were also developed and integrated with parallel processing desktop grid technology. Taverna workflow management system was used to build up and carry out elaborated workflows like seamless data flow to model simulation, Monte Carlo experiment, model sensitivity analysis, model-data fusion, estimation of ecosystem service indicators or extensive spatial modelling. Straightforward management of complex data analysis tasks, organized into appropriately documented, shared and reusable scientific workflows enables researchers to carry out detailed and scientifically challenging 'in silico' experiments and applications that could open new directions in ecosystem research and in a broader sense it supports progress in environmental modelling. The workflow approach built upon these web services allows even the most complicated computations to be initiated without the need of programming skills and deep understanding of model structure and initialization. The developments enable a wider array of scientists to perform ecosystem scale simulations, and to perform analyses not previously possible due to high complexity and computational demand.