The National Science Foundation is providing Cornell University with $10 million in grant funding for a collaboration dubbed Computational Sustainability.

Cornell’s 14-member faculty, and faculty from Oregon State University, Howard University, Bowdoin College, the US Department of Energy and the Conservation Fund are combining expertise from many disciplines including computer and environmental sciences, mathematics, economics, and biology to tackle some of the world’s most challenging questions.

How can humanity minimize its impact on the environment? What can we do to reverse climate change? How can we keep ice sheets from melting? The hope is that each discipline will contribute to information and data so that existing conditions can be entered into a computer model and then future conditions can be predicted.

Running difference data sets throughout the model can provide various answers to potential world conditions. For example, by imputing observational data about the eating habits of birds in a particular habitat region, and knowing where about the species habitat needs, predictions can be made about the likelihood of the success on introducing that species into a new habitat. Or, greater efficiency predictions can be gained by running scenarios for biofuel production.

To share their results, the program will publish the Journal of Computational Sustainability.