Date: July 20, 2021
Presenters: Ferdinando Villa, ARIES Lead Investigator, Professor at the Basque Centre for Climate Change; Ken Bagstad, Research Economist, Geosciences & Environmental Change Science Center, U.S. Geological Survey; Stefano Balbi, ARIES Managing Director, Research Fellow at the Basque Centre for Climate Change
Summary: Ocean accounting quantifies the benefits that oceans provide to society through integration of diverse data and models. This talk will describe how the Artificial Intelligence for Environment and Sustainability (ARIES) modeling platform uses AI to foster data and model interoperability based on the FAIR Principles. ARIES provides open-source software tools for (1) scientists to contribute data and models to a growing knowledge network and (2) nontechnical stakeholders to access data and models in a user-friendly and transparent way via a web interface. The approach has been applied to natural capital accounting in partnership with the U.N., and could naturally be extended to ocean accounting to support faster, easier, and more consistent compilation of ocean accounts.
Bios:
Ferdinando Villa is an Ikerbasque Professor at BC3. He started out as a Theoretical Ecologist and had a long parallel career as a Scientific Software Designer and Engineer. After carrying out research in many fields of Ecology, he worked for 15 years in ecological economics at the universities of Maryland and Vermont. He has authored or coauthored 150+ scientific publications, and has received major research grants from the US National Science Foundation, the European Union, the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), UNEP-WCMC and other institutions and NGOs.
Stefano Balbi is an Ikerbasque Research Fellow at BC3. Since completing his Master’s in Environmental Economics, he has studied human-natural systems interactions from a holistic perspective, where theories and approaches from both social and environmental scientific practice are integrated to better represent behaviors, spatial dependencies and temporal dynamics. This led him to pursue a PhD in Analysis and Governance of Sustainable Development and to direct his interests towards research in human geography, to explore the complexity of social-ecological systems.
Ken Bagstad is a Research Economist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), working to account for nature’s value in decision making by U.S. Federal government agencies and others, and co-leading development of natural capital accounts for the U.S. He holdsa PhD in Ecological Economics from the University of Vermont. From 2015-2016 he was a Senior Environmental Specialist with the World Bank’s Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) program. Since 2010, he has partnered with various U.S. government resource management agencies on ecosystem service assessments across the U.S.
Dr. Monica Grasso (Facilitator), NOAA Chief Economist, Performance, Risk and Social Science (PRSSO)
Sponsors: NOAA's Performance, Risk & Social Science Office (PRSSO) and NOAA Central Library (NCL)
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