GLOBE

Evolving New Global Workflows for Land Change Science

GLOBE was designed to transform land system science by creating new global scientific workflows that integrate local-, regional- and global-scale researchers, expertise and data based their global relevance using an online collaboration environment leveraging social-computational algorithms and real-time quantitative global and statistical visualization.

To solve global problems, we need global scientific understanding of local change.

To understand global changes in the Earth system, scientists must generalize globally from observations made locally and regionally.  In land change science, ecology, archaeology, anthropology and other disciplines in which field studies are costly and time consuming, observations are generally obtained by researchers working at disparate local and regional case study sites chosen for different reasons.  As a result, scientific understanding of global pattern, process and change in these disciplines tends to be based on non-statistical inferences made from observations collated and analyzed by informal methods.

GLOBE aims to transform global change science by enabling new scientific workflows based on statistically robust, globally relevant integration of local and regional observations using an online social-computational system. 

GLOBE Website

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant CNS 1125210 awarded September 15, 2011. Initial support provided by the UMBC Research Seed Funding Initiative (RSFI).

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Related Publications

Wohner, Christoph; Ohnemus, Thomas; Zacharias, Steffen; Mollenhauer, Hannes; Ellis, Erle C., Klug, Hermann; Shibata, Hideaki; Mirtl, Michael . 2021. Assessing the biogeographical and socio-ecological representativeness of the ILTER site network. Ecological Indicators 127: 107785. [Download PDF]
Margulies, Jared D.; Magliocca, Nicholas R.; Schmill, Matthew D.; Ellis, Erle C.. 2016. Ambiguous Geographies: Connecting Case Study Knowledge with Global Change Science. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 106(3): 572-596. [Download PDF]
Magliocca, Nicholas R.; Ellis, Erle C.; Allington, Ginger R. H.; de Bremond, Ariane; Dell’Angelo, Jampel; Mertz, Ole; Messerli, Peter; Meyfroidt, Patrick; Seppelt, Ralf; Verburg, Peter H.. 2018. Closing global knowledge gaps: Producing generalized knowledge from case studies of social-ecological systems. Global Environmental Change 50: 1-14. [Download PDF]
Magliocca, Nicholas R.; Rudel, Thomas K.; Verburg, Peter H.; McConnell, William J.; Mertz, Ole; Gerstner, Katharina; Heinimann, Andreas; Ellis, Erle C.. 2015. Synthesis in land change science: methodological patterns, challenges, and guidelines. Regional Environmental Change 15(2): 211-226. [Download PDF]
Schmill, Matthew D.; Gordon, Lindsey M.; Magliocca, Nicholas R.; Ellis, Erle C.; Oates, Tim. 2014. GLOBE: Analytics for Assessing Global Representativeness. Computing for Geospatial Research and Application (COM.Geo), 2014 Fifth International Conference on: 25-32. [Download PDF]
Ellis, Erle C.; Fuller, Dorian Q.; Kaplan, Jed O.; Lutters, Wayne G.. 2013. Dating the Anthropocene: Towards an empirical global history of human transformation of the terrestrial biosphere. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 1: 000018. [Download PDF]
van Vliet, Jasper; Magliocca, Nicholas R.; Büchner, Bianka; Cook, Elizabeth; Rey Benayas, José M.; Ellis, Erle C.; Heinimann, Andreas; Keys, Eric; Lee, TienMing; Liu, Jianguo; Mertz, Ole; Meyfroidt, Patrick; Moritz, Mark; Poeplau, Christopher; Robinson, Brian E.; Seppelt, Ralf; Seto, Karen C.; Verburg, PeterH. 2016. Meta-studies in land use science: Current coverage and prospects. AMBIO 45(1): 15-28. [Download PDF]
Verburg, Peter H.; Crossman, Neville; Ellis, Erle C.; Heinimann, Andreas; Hostert, Patrick; Mertz, Ole; Nagendra, Harini; Sikor, Thomas; Erb, Karl-Heinz; Golubiewski, Nancy; Grau, Ricardo; Grove, Morgan; Konaté, Souleymane; Meyfroidt, Patrick; Parker, Dawn C.; Chowdhury, Rinku Roy; Shibata, Hideaki; Thomson, Allison; Zhen, Lin. 2015. Land system science and sustainable development of the earth system: A global land project perspective. Anthropocene 12: 29–41. [Download PDF]
Magliocca, N. R.; Ellis, E. C.; Oates, T.; Schmill, M.. 2014. Contextualizing the global relevance of local land change observations. IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science 18: 012107. [Download PDF]
Estes, Lyndon; Elsen, Paul R.; Treuer, Timothy; Ahmed, Labeeb; Caylor, Kelly; Chang, Jason; Choi, Jonathan J.; Ellis, Erle C.. 2018. The spatial and temporal domains of modern ecology. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2: 819–826. [Download PDF]
Karl, Jason W.; Herrick, Jeffrey E.; Unnasch, Robert S.; Gillan, Jeffrey K.; Ellis, Erle C.; Lutters, Wayne G.; Martin, Laura J.. 2013. Discovering ecologically-relevant knowledge from published studies through geo-semantic searching. BioScience 63: 674–682. [Download PDF]
Ellis, Erle C.. 2012. The GLOBE Project: accelerating global synthesis of local studies in land change science. Newsletter of the Global Land Project(8): 5-6. [Download PDF]

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