BioClimate

Climate and biodiversity systems are closely linked across a wide range of scales. To better understand the mutual interaction between climate change and biodiversity there is a strong need for multidisciplinary skills, scientific tools, and access to a large variety of heterogeneous, often distributed, data sources. Related to that, the EUBrazilCloudConnect project provides a user-oriented research environment built on top of a federated cloud infrastructure across Europe and Brazil, to serve key needs in different scientific domains, which is validated through a set of use cases. Among them, the most data-centric one is focused on climate change and biodiversity research. As part of this use case, the BioClimate Science Gateway has been implemented to provide end-users transparent access to (i) a highly integrated user-friendly environment, (ii) a large variety of data sources, and (iii) different analytics & visualization tools to serve a large spectrum of users needs and requirements. This paper presents a complete overview of BioClimate and the related scientific environment, in particular its Science Gateway, delivered to the end-user community at the end of the project. • Climate and biodiversity systems are closely linked across a wide range of scales. • User-centric research environment built on top of a federated cloud infrastructure. • A multi-scale, integrated approach to investigate the climate-biodiversity system. • The BioClimate Science Gateway represents the high-level interface for scientists. • BioClimate supports different kinds of scientific data analysis.