An important focus of scientific research is understanding the complex interactions between human societies and the climatic, physical, and biological environments on which they depend, and which they, in turn, influence. Past environments, of course, were often quite different from those we experience today. Furthermore, important processes of social and environmental change operate slowly and are sometimes visible only when viewed over decades or centuries. In order to study social and natural processes operating over anything other than short periods in recent decades, long-term environmental knowledge specific to particular locations and times is essential.

Unfortunately, state-of-the-art data on past environments are difficult to find and even more difficult to integrate and interpret. Under the direction of Dr. Kintigh and his colleagues, the project will develop plans for an online tool, SKOPE (Synthesized Knowledge of Past Environments), that will provide state-of-the-art information about the environment experienced by humans at a given a place and time, past or present. Using explicit scientific procedures, it will process the data to yield a cutting-edge synthesis of environmental information specifically tailored to the user's request. Initial development is planned for the Southwest US, but SKOPE's design will be designed to be easily extended to other places and times. Once implemented, SKOPE will be freely accessible on the Internet. It will be applicable in such fields as sustainability, archaeology, sociology, economics, anthropology, and ecology as well as for resource management and planning. For example, it will directly benefit archaeologists comparing the social consequences of long-term climate change across different civilizations and ecologists investigating long-term changes in biodiversity. Planners could use its long-term environmental reconstructions to investigate vulnerabilities in existing infrastructure that are outside the experience provided by the historic record. Students and members of the general public could learn how ancient environments differed from contemporary ones in places they study, inhabit, or visit.

SKOPE will access online databases of modern and historic observational data (for example, on rainfall, temperature, and plant and animal distributions) as well as databases of indicators for past environments (for example, rainfall reconstructed from tree-ring widths, and plant remains and animal bones found in dated archaeological sites). Scientific experts in the interpretation of different classes of data will develop procedures that transform these diverse environmental observations and indicators into a thoroughly documented scientific synthesis of the environment for the time and place of interest. The design of SKOPE will be guided by the needs stated by potential users in meetings with academic, public-, and private-sector professionals. The project will identify key sources of data on current and past environments and will generalize the analytical procedures required to achieve useful synthesis. Subsequent development could extend the tool to additional areas and times and incorporate more classes of environmental data.