iBiosphere

Reaching the goal of long-tem sustainability of the biosphere requires us to coordinate and collaborate on a scale that has never been seen before. We cannot simply design a program to `save the biosphere.’ Rather, the first prerequisite for solving such an unprecedently large and complex system is to guide the development of a “global brain,” an emergent property arising from the integration of People and Knowledge on a vast, unparalleled scale. iBiosphere describes all aspects of the MetaWeb that together facilitate the conduct and application of science toward the goal of long-term sustainability. It will be both people-based and knowledge-based. It will be served by a cyber-infrastructure platform that provides access to all relevant tools, data and knowledge and that will facilitate the formation of new communities that are coincident with needs. The result will be a global cooperative, the iBiosphere cooperative, comprised of all interested participants, from natural scientists and engineers to social scientists and policymakers and to educators, students and citizen-scientists.