STOAT

STOAT annotates biodiversity, genetic, and ecosystem observations with spatially and temporally explicit environmental data to integrate occurrence records with remotely sensed and modeled datasets for ecological analyses.

Key Features:

• Flexible Spatial and Temporal Resolution: Allows specification of spatial and temporal resolution (grain) for annotations to match ecological scales.
• Buffering Capabilities: Supports user-defined buffering to account for spatial uncertainty and ecological process extents.
• Integration with Remote Sensing Data: Annotates records using near-global remotely sensed and modeled datasets, including Landsat, MODIS, EarthEnv, and CHELSA.
• Programmatic Access via R Package (rstoat): Provides programmatic access through the R package rstoat for integration into analysis workflows.
• Linkage to Map of Life: Connects to the Map of Life database to access biodiversity occurrence records for annotation tasks.
• Cloud-based Scalability: Leverages cloud computing to process large volumes of data and scale annotation workflows.

Scientific Applications:

• Scale-dependence analysis: Investigating the scale dependence of ecological observations and processes by comparing annotations across spatial and temporal grains.
• Phenology and temporal dynamics: Studying phenological variation and other dynamic ecological phenomena through time-explicit environmental annotations.
• Continental-scale species–environment analysis: Characterizing environmental conditions of bird observations at continental scales to examine species–environment interactions.

Methodology:

Performs spatially and temporally flexible annotations of biodiversity records (including user-defined buffering) against remotely sensed and modeled environmental datasets, with processing executed via cloud computing.