Ecoinformatics software infrastructure

CFER lab equipment includes entomological storage equipment, including 24 Cornell insect storage drawers in two cabinets for temporary collections and related equipment for handling specimens. There is also a dedicated stereomicroscope with a digital camera attachment and very high resolution capability for examination of specimens and microscopic measurement.

Sun Ultra 40 processing and storage

CFER has a 10.5 terabyte XServe RAID storage facility dedicated to ecoinformatics research. The XServe RAID facility is powered by a quad-core XServe and administered using an 8-Core Xeon Mac Pro with 8 GB of RAM. Counting all CFER workstations, we have about nearly 20 terabytes of storage and effective supercomputing power, sufficient for all ecoinformatics research that we can initiate for quite some time. We have a subscription that supports nearly unlimited high resolution SPOT imagery purchases for the next several years, complementing existing Vegetation and MODIS datasets for Canada and the world.

Ecoinformatics software infrastructure

CFER software infrastructure includes PCI Geomatica 10 (site-licensed) and eCognition, full ESRI Arc/Info GIS software suites on all workstations, S-Plus 7.0 and spatial statistics modules, PC-ORD multivariate statistics, Systat 10, Adobe Creative Suite, Matlab, and the usual office and database software suites. These software tools are supplemented as necessary using Arc Macro Language and C++ programs.

Field equipment

CFER has a complete array of field equipment, including a LiCOR leaf area index metre (LAI 2000), high resolution digital camera, ASD Spectroradiometer (with short-wave infrared detection capabilities) with a field-portable notebook computer, portable meteorological stations, GPS, field radios with a nominal 11km range, and a variety of utility equipment (never travel without rope!). Some of this field equipment is available for other research groups (and by special arrangement to external researchers) to use on a not-for-profit, cost recovery basis.

Field vehicle

CFER's array of field equipment would be of little use without a way to bring team members and equipment to research sites. With generous support from CFI and the Ontario Research Fund, I have recently purchased a 2006 Toyota Rav4 for the CFER research group. The field vehicle can be made available to other research groups when not in use by the ecoinformatics group on a cost recovery basis.