Virtual Prairie
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Introduction
Grassland, or prairie, ecosystems play an important ecological role, capturing atmospheric carbon and filtering out pollutants that can contaminate water. In places where natural prairies have been destroyed or degraded, rebuilding them -- or building well-designed new ones -- can have a significant environmental impact. Growing and testing prairie designs in the real world is a process that can take years to yield results, however. Using the power of distributed volunteer computing, researchers can instead build and experiment with "virtual prairies," testing the functionality of various designs far more quickly, and helping ensure the availability of fresh unpolluted water for generations to come.

Project page: http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/

Sponsors: Department of Computer Sciences, University of Houston; Universite de Rennes; Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France); Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)

Start date: May 2008

Contents

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Videos

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Science

[The Science section might (or might not) be divided into two parts: {1} general discussion of the field, and then {2} a discussion of the project's specific endeavor. For instance, in LHC@home, we might have {1} "Science of the Large Hardon Collider" and then {2} "Science of LHC@home"
The above is desirable, because in most cases, the field of research is really fascinating, and presenting this in broad terms-- outlining the big questions-- can make it easier to understand the particulars of the project and why it is important. ]

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Results

  1. Garbey, M., Mony, C. & Smaoui, M. (2008). Parallel Multiscale Software for fluid flow- Agent Based Hybrid Models. 20th international Conference of Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics 18-22 mai 2008, France.
    Click here to view the document

  2. Garbey, M. (2008). Virtual Prairies with Boinc. The 4th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, September 11-12, 2008 ,INRIA Grenoble, France.
    Click here to view the document
    Click here to view the video

  3. Mony, C., Garbey, M. & Smaoui, M. (2008). Using modelling to understand clonal strategies in optimal growing conditions. 51st annual Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science 7-12 septembre 2008, South Africa.

  4. Smaoui, M., Garbey, M. & Mony, C. Volunteer computing for ecology: the Virtual Prairie BOINC project, accepted for publication in IEEE Asia-Pacific Services
    Computing Conference (IEEE APSCC 2008), Taiwan.
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Links of Interest

[Why recreate the wheel; there are lots of great sources out there.; a good list of sources can be really useful to the reader.]

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Virtual Prairie in the Classroom

[For each project, please add a "[Projectname] in the Classroom" section-- with a link to Volunteer Computing In the Classroom and an article named "[Projectname] in the Classroom". (Then please add "[Projectname] in the Classroom" to the list on the main Education page.)]

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