FSML: Improving Information Technology to Facilitate Research at the Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

The Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology (PLE; http://www.biology.pitt.edu/facilities/pymatuning), located on Pymatuning Lake in northwest Pennsylvania, is the University of Pittsburgh's field station. PLE has been a site of research and education in biology for 85 years. This project will improve internet access at the station's two main sites, Sanctuary Lake and Housing, by replacing the current DSL service with optical fiber-based Dedicated Internet Access (DIA). Consistent with its aim of providing a research infrastructure on par with a Research-1 facility, this improvement will allow PLE for the first time to provide its research users with fast, reliable, and consistent access to the internet. These improvements will open up new opportunities for PLE's education and outreach missions as well. The fiber-optic DIA will be much better positioned to keep pace with the needs of PLE's undergraduate and graduate students and will facilitate training in data-intensive areas of biology, such as remote sensing, global information systems (GIS), and bioinformatics. PLE's outreach mission offers a number of inquiry-based learning opportunities for middle and high school students that take the form of off-site student-designed experiments. Having a reliable virtual connection to such students will allow for videoconferencing, which will facilitate the growth of this type of outreach at PLE. This project aims to run optical fiber to PLE's two most heavily used sites, with the goal of providing up to 20MB (upload and download) Dedicated Internet Access bandwidth to PLE users. This represents a substantial increase in the bandwidths PLE currently provides and will greatly reduce the potential for bottlenecks during periods of high use, as occurs during the spring and summer months. With these improvements, primary investigators (PIs) and their research teams will be able to reliably access bandwidth-intensive applications, such as downloading GIS, weather station, or metagenomics data from publicly available datasets, moving Powerpoint or other large media files to and from cloud storage, or uploading newly-collected datasets to data repositories. With increased bandwidth PLE researchers will also be able to more effectively manage other responsibilities while in residence at PLE, such as editing journals, submitting manuscripts and grant proposals, and having virtual meetings with students and colleagues.