A new field of Sustainability Science and Engineering is emerging that seeks to understand the fundamental character of interactions between nature and human society and to help steer the impact of humanity's needs on the planet's natural resources towards sustainable trajectories. The field is unified in clear terms by its ultimate goals but occupies an interdisciplinary position among traditional research fields, spanning both science and engineering and spreading across disciplines as diverse as agriculture, ecology, oceanography, climate studies, economics, a diverse set of social sciences, energy and materials and several additional aspects of engineering, physics, biology, and chemistry. Although Sustainability Science and engineering is by now widely discussed in the scientific and engineering community, and is beginning to be connected to the political agenda for economic and social development, it remains unclear to what extent its many facets are being integrated into a global perspective and whether researchers are utilizing it as a nexus to collaborate across traditional scientific and engineering fields.

Please consult the Mapping the Structure and Evolution of Sustainability Science workshop web page for further information and details.

This web site provides an interactive interface to publication, patent, and funding data on 'biomass' and 'biofuel' research. Visitors are invited to explore what funding is available in what geospatial regions and in what areas of science and what publications and patents result.

A geospatial map is used to show the geospatial coverage of research and development (R&D) efforts. The UCSD Map of Science reference system is used to communicate the interdisciplinarity of R&D efforts. The UCSD map is the product of a large study by researchers at the University of California San Diego using 7.2 million papers and over 16,000 separate journals, proceedings, and series from Thomson Scientific and Scopus over the five year period from 2001 to 2005. The researchers used citations between the papers and journals to cluster journals into small groups of highly related journals. Those clusters are represented by 554 individual nodes in the network. Nodes are connected by links if their respective journal sets are related. Each cluster node is labeled by the content area shared by the journals in the cluster and colored coded by its overarching scientific domain - a total of 13 are given here.

Search for 'corn' to see where related work is performed. Zoom into a geospatial or scientific area. Click on a record to access details listed by the original data providers.

This project is lead by Katy Borner, Indiana University and Luis M. A. Bettencourt, LANL. The web site was designed by Chin Hua Kong, Angela M. Zoss, Micah W. Linnemeier, Patrick A. Phillips, Joseph Biberstine, and Michael J. Stamper at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, SLIS, Indiana University.

This project is funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CBET-0831636. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.