UK ITS earns funding through CAPTIVATE KY grant to develop climate data infrastructure

University of Kentucky Information Technology Services (ITS) is playing an important role as part of a statewide effort that will improve collaborative climate and environmental research across Kentucky.

UK ITS received $1.8 million sub-award under the CAPTIVATE KY project led by the Kentucky Science & Engineering Foundation, an initiative of Kentucky Science & Technology Corporation. CAPTIVATE KY is building Kentucky's first centralized climate data repository.

Awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), ITS is helping build infrastructure for a data repository that will allow researchers to store, share and use environmental data throughout Kentucky.

Building a shared data resource for Kentucky

As part of the initiative, ITS is supporting a large-scale data repository designed to house environmental research data collected anywhere in Kentucky.

“The NSF sub-award was $1.8 million,” said Rob Quick, director of Research Computing Infrastructure. “That includes hardware to host the data repository services and three years of maintenance and upkeep of that hardware.”

The repository, located at the Commonwealth Office of Technology in Frankfort, will allow researchers to manage, deposit and access data through a single interface.

Anthony Elam, the associate director for the Center for Computational Sciences, is a consultant for the project.

“This is a completely new set of infrastructure,” Elam said. “We will also have partnerships with other facilities like the Mesonet system at Western Kentucky University and the Kentucky Geological Survey, both have an extraordinary amount of good environmental type data sets.”

Providing environmental data access across the commonwealth

By creating a shared repository, the new system is designed to change how research data is used across the state.

Researchers often collect their own datasets—even when similar data might already exist. The CAPTIVATE KY project helps remove that redundancy.

“The idea is we don’t want every researcher to have to collect their own data, which can become expensive,” Quick said. “If we make a repository where people can deposit this data and other researchers can come in and collect it, then you can increase the impact of existing data.”

Making this data easier to find, access and reuse will provide additional resources that universities and researchers may not have had access to.

Supporting research that impacts Kentucky communities

The system will store a wide range of environmental data, from rainfall patterns to soil conditions, helping researchers better understand and respond to challenges facing Kentucky.

“Kentucky has a lot of climate and environmental challenges…we have sinkholes, flash flooding…landslides,” Elam said. “We need to do the best job possible in being able to make predictions.”

By capturing and aggregating data from across the state, the system will help researchers model risks, analyze trends and improve forecasting.

Eventually, the system will be made public and will support K-12 and undergraduate educational programs.

“We want most of the data to be public facing,” Elam said.

In addition, the system will include tools for basic data visualization, giving users the ability to explore and better understand complex datasets.

“It also allows citizen science,” Rob Quick said. “If I wanted to see a rainfall heat map visualization of Kentucky, that should be relatively easy to produce if the data is stored in the CAPTIVATE repository.”

A significant Kentucky investment

UK ITS received the CAPTIVATE KY grant subaward at a time when federal funding has become more limited and competitive.

The award is part of the NSF’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program, which supports efforts that enhance STEM research in states that historically receive a disproportionately low percentage of federal research funding.

Although the focus will be on building the repository, the potential benefits of sharing research data could mean more opportunities for researchers and universities across the commonwealth.

“You could picture a lot of potential use cases. Making the data available means that it can also be used in a way that even researchers that collected the data hadn't envisioned” Quick said. “So, for example, rainfall data can be used in several different research applications, like soil erosion is important for crops, important for wildlife migration and diversity, building and industry. This repository allows multiple research areas to benefit from a single data set.”

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 2438201. 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 U.S. National Science Foundation.