About Grand Challenges

An organizing principle of the iPlant Collaborative are Grand Challenge Teams, cross-disciplinary, community-driven research groups which work collaboratively with iPlant staff to design and develop ‘Discovery Environments’, software platforms custom designed to help the GC team address the selected Grand Challenge. Discovery Environments will typically take the form of “mashup” applications, which facilitate the integration of diverse types of data and tools; but beneath their surface simplicity, Discovery Environments will support sophisticated systems for semantic integration, description, and manipulation of biological data types. Discovery Environments will be integrated into the growing iPlant cyberinfrastructure, becoming in time an open source resource that is expanded and maintained by the community as a whole. Decisions for the allocation of iPlant resources to specific Grand Challenges is made by a community-representative Board of Directors (BoD), not by iPlant personnel.