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What We Do

The Scientific Computing team is a small (but mighty!) team of data scientists supporting synthesis working groups funded by the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network Office. Participation in these groups is open to scientists from within and outside of the LTER Network. We provide modern technological infrastructure to support analytical, computing, or network-based needs for these synthesis working groups.

We are housed at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). Our goal is to support and promote an open and reproducible approach to synthesis science. We do so by providing on-demand training, advising, and direct code/data support. In addition to the support during in-person meetings at NCEAS, our team is available in-between visits to discuss and advise on data science and scientific programming tasks, such as:

  • Structuring and integrating heterogeneous datasets
  • Writing code to wrangle, analyze, model, or visualize the data your group has already collected
  • Designing workflows, scripting best practices for reproducible science, and reviewing code
  • Helping you get set up on NCEAS’ server and scale your analysis
  • Preserving and promoting your products on the internet
    • Including everything from derived datasets and terminological glossaries/vocabularies to scripts, model codes, and interactive “web applications”
  • Offering workshops on new skills or programs (such as Git/GitHub)

Depending on your team’s preferences, we can operate on a spectrum of independence ranging from complete self-sufficiency after initial definition of task scope to coding together with your team.

Contact our team with your requests at scicomp [at] nceas.ucsb.edu

Diagram of typical working group process beginning at an initial plan-making meeting followed by a series of meetings to guide project(s) from hypotheses through analysis and finally publication and preservation of papers/data/code products