The System of Agents for Forest Observation Research with Advanced Hierarchies (SAFORAH) is a grid-enabled environment that makes optimum use of distributed data storage facilities and boosts research productivity, reliability and efficiency within the Canadian government and partnering scientific institutions. SAFORAH was built with an extensible data grid network based on Globus Toolkit 4.0 (GT-4) and transparently presents the distributed data storage facilities across multiple organizations and government agencies as one single data archive to facilitate easy EO data archiving and distribution. SAFORAH provides standard OGC Web services interfaces to users and other OGC enabled geospatial information systems. The actual services implementation was based on the Web Service Resource Frame Work (WSRF) and implemented in the GT-4 environment, including the Grid-enabled Web Map Service (GWMS), Grid-enabled Web Coverage Service (GWCS), Grid-enabled Catalog Service for Web (GCSW) and Control Grid Service (CGS). These Web services can work either independently or collaboratively. Currently, four Canadian Forestry Centres located in Victoria British Columbia, Cornerbrook Newfoundland, Edmonton, Alberta and Laurentian Québec and Environment Canada's Canadian Wildlife Service are operationally connected to the SAFORAH data grid. The connection to a large petabyte storage facility under development at the University of Victoria (UVic) was also established. SAFORAH has been used in CFS's national programs to support the national monitoring of Canada's forests. The web address for SAFORAH is http://www.saforah.org.

Hao Chen is a physical scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre, Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada. He earned his M.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Victoria. Currently, he is leading the development of the System of Agents for Forest Observation Research with Advanced Hierarchies (SAFORAH), a web-based, multi-standards compliant, data access and service system for archiving, managing and distributing multi-source remote sensing data. SAFORAH has demonstrated the power of Grid computing and web services for the development of earth observation information systems.

• Hao_Chen.ppt: Slides