Customized Online Aggregation Summarization Tool for Environmental Rasters (COASTER).docVIP

Journal of Geographic Information System, 2012, 4, 530-541 /10.4236/jgis.2012.46058 Published Online December 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/jgis) Customized Online Aggregation Summarization Tool for Environmental Rasters (COASTER) Daniel J. Weiss, Katie Gibson, Charles Sojka, Jennifer W. Sheldon, Robert L. Crabtree Yellowstone Ecological Research Center, Bozeman, USA Email: weiss@ Received August 3, 2012; revised September 5, 2012; accepted October 25, 2012 ABSTRACT The Customized Online Aggregation Summarization Tool for Environmental Rasters (COASTER) system (www.COASTER) was developed by Yellowstone Ecological Research Center (YERC) () in response to the information needs of end-user communities interested in deci- sion-support for natural resource management. The purpose of COASTER is to greatly simplify the process of creating predictor datasets for research exploring environmental impacts driven by climate change, land-use activities, distur- bance, and invasive spread. COASTER achieves this goal by providing users with a web-based system for processing environmental (gridded, raster) datasets, using a set of standardized functions, to create output customized to meet their analytical needs. In doing so, COASTER effectively translates large and cumbersome datasets into user-specified in- formation useful for parameterizing statistical models and for visualizing spatial and temporal patterns within environ- mental datasets. The COASTER system currently contains over 10 terabytes of climate data from several sources. These datasets have daily temporal resolutions, spatial resolutions ranging from 1km to 330km, and temporal extents ranging from 30 to 64 years (1948-2011). COASTER datasets are primarily limited to North America, but gridded datasets from other regions can easily be added to the system. Variables within the climatic datasets available on COASTER include metrics qua