We make a case for "planetary computing" -- infrastructure to handle the ingestion, transformation, analysis and publication of global data products for furthering environmental science and enabling better informed policy-making. We draw on our experiences as a team of computer scientists working with environmental scientists on forest carbon and biodiversity preservation, and classify existing solutions by their flexibility in scalably processing geospatial data, and also how well they support building trust in the results via traceability and reproducibility. We identify research gaps in the intersection of computing and environmental science around how to handle continuously changing datasets that are often collected across decades and require careful access control rather than being fully open access.
@article{arxiv.2303.04501,
title = {Planetary computing for data-driven environmental policy-making},
author = {Patrick Ferris and Michael Dales and Sadiq Jaffer and Amelia Holcomb and Eleanor Toye Scott and Thomas Swinfield and Alison Eyres and Andrew Balmford and David Coomes and Srinivasan Keshav and Anil Madhavapeddy},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.04501},
year = {2024}
}