UMBC Researchers Receive $1.8 Million Grant to Build a “Toolbox for Global Thinking”

A team of UMBC researchers has received a four-year, $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an online infrastructure intended to vastly improve how scientists study land change. The new toolbox aims to allow researchers to rapidly share, compare and synthesize local studies and combine them with global datasets of human and environmental variables. A planned social-networking component would also allow researchers to more easily find one another and collaborate. The simplest description: “A globally relevant Google scholar,” says Erle C. Ellis, the principal investigator on the grant and associate professor of geography and environmental systems at …