Big Data

Last week in Barcelona, Huffington announced a visionary partnership with Hewlett Packard (HP) called HP Earth Insights. This program will revolutionize the way we monitor, report and understand the health of ecosystems. Environmental scientists across the globe will be able to put their field research findings into mobile HP tablets through communication applications and analyze and share that data in visual, user-friendly dashboards that reveal tropical changes in near real-time. HP Earth Insights will help us link tropical forest data with other data repositories at the Smithsonian Institution and Wildlife Conservation Society, and connect the dots to further populate a measure of tropical forest biodiversity known as the Wildlife Picture Index. Before this program, there was a significant lag between the collection of data and the publication of it where more data is collected. The ability to quickly synthesize the telltale signs of ecosystem decline -- and getting that information into the hands of leaders in time for them to make informed decisions -- has become a priority for CI and its partners. This is why the HP Earth Insights partnership is so ground-breaking.