System of Agents for Forest Observation Research with Advanced Hierarchies (SAFORAH)

David G. Goodenough, Canadian Forest Service, Canada

System of Agents for Forest Observation Research with Advanced Hierarchies (SAFORAH) is an advanced grid cyberinfrastructure that makes optimum use of distributed data storage in a manner that boosts research productivity, reliability, and efficiency, required by large national projects. Canada is the second largest country in the world by area.  Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has national and international obligations to report on the state of Canada's forests, which include national forest inventory, national forest carbon accounting and reporting, and programs for land cover mapping, change monitoring and sustainable development. To meet these requirements, earth observation (EO) data are collected and processed to create EO information products by the Canadian Forest Service (CFS), a branch of NRCan. To support our national forest information projects, SAFORAH was developed.  SAFORAH provides support for collaborative research of NRCan's national programs by increasing the sharing of the collected EO data, advanced automation methods, computing resources, and distributed data storage. SAFORAH is also a practical and efficient tool for public users to access EO data and information products derived from the national programs.  These products showcase Canadian expertise and strength in sustainable forest management. The SAFORAH implementation builds on an extensible data grid with Globus Toolkit [1] and customized software over high-bandwidth networks. A unique feature is that SAFORAH transparently presents the distributed data storage facilities across multiple organizations as single compute storage to users. One of the core components of SAFORAH is the Catalogue and User Data Ordering System (CUDOS) [2], an online metadata database system with its own security for managing EO metadata and used as a Web portal to the SAFORAH data grid. It is the CUDOS's responsibility to sign into the SAFORAH data grid using a Grid Canada's credential for authorized CUDOS users. CUDOS owns the knowledge about EO data location and uses a file transfer agent, the Grid File Transfer Protocol [3], for transferring EO data to/from the distributed data storage facilities. Currently, CFS Victoria, CFS Cornerbrook, CFS Northern, and CFS Laurentian are operationally connected to the SAFORAH data grid. The connection to a large petabyte storage facility [4] under development at the University of Victoria (UVic) is established as well. With respect to EO data for forest research, SAFORAH supports most of spaceborne and airborne sensors, including Landsat TM/ETM+, Radarsat-1, PROBA-1 CHRIS, EO-1 ALI/Hyperion, SPOT, ASTER, ENVISAT ASAR/MERIS, and JERS-1 Mosaic.

References
1. Globus Toolkit, http://www.globus.org/
2. R. Mathews, et al. "Catalogue and User Data Ordering System", CUDOS Version 3.0, MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. 2003.
3. W. Allcock, "GridFTP Protocol Specification", Tech. Rep. GFD.20, Global Grid, Forum 2003.
4. Research Computing Facility, http://rcf.uvic.ca/


keywords: SAFORAH, data grid, CUDOS, EO data, forests