YELLOWSTONE ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH CENTER

Preventative Healthcare for Ecosystems

A platform to monitor, understand, and improve the health of our planet’s ecosystems

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Yellowstone Ecological Research Center (YERC) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to put community science to work for conservation success in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and beyond. YERC is run in partnership and with the support of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Jerry Metcalf Foundation, Experiment, Topcoder, and Microsoft’s AI for Earth grant.

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Prizes and LEADERBOARD

In this Crowd for Good program we are asking our community to volunteer their time and talents in support of a worthy cause.

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Yellowstone Guided
Tour Packages

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Yellowstone Virtual Ecological Workshops

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TCO

TCO Points

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50

YERC Hats, Shirts,
and Maps

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Mention in the
YERC Newsletter

RANK HANDLE YERC POINTS
1eriantoongko3162.5
2blue.nguyen2510
3rajeshrathod 2475
4iqbalhood 2337.5
5Ansary 2000
6mawreez 1200
7cdharmateja 550
8fikzzzy 400
9harishchennupa 400
10yanwarpro 275

VIEW ACTIVE CHALLENGES

FEATURED MEMBER

It’s a rare opportunity for a designer/design copilot to be able to join a project like this, and I enjoyed it very much…it will be cool to say that I have taken my part to help conserve Yellowstone’s nature.

Photo fajar
fajar.mln

Topcoder member
since 2008

YERC is the research center for the first national park in the U.S. It would be great to be part of the project. And make it one of the portfolios in my design career.

Photo iqbalhood @1x
iqbalhood

Topcoder member
since 2015

I took part in the 2nd and 3rd YERC design challenge. It was an interesting challenge and for a great cause plus there were TCO points for the taking. I am glad I could win some points and support the cause.

Photo rajeshrathod @1x
rajeshrathod

Topcoder member
since 2006

WHY PARTICIPATE?

1. Use your skills to help preserve wildlife and ecosystems

2. Win incredible prizes from the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center

3. Receive credit for your contributions on the YERC EPIIC site

4. Build up your TCO Points

5. Enhance your CV/resume and portfolio with this environment-focused project

Preventative Healthcare for Ecosystems

Wildlife and wild ecosystems around the world are facing unprecedented challenges due to natural and human-related environmental changes. Healthy ecosystems are the foundation of all civilization and necessary for sustaining our economies–and the health of our families and friends. They clean our water, renew our soil, purify the air we breathe, and provide us with food. At both a micro and macro level, the well-being of humanity is dependent on the ecological health of the planet.

The problem we are faced with is a serious one, and it is made much more difficult by data limitations: key data do not exist and what does exist is often inaccessible or is not interoperable. Consequently, this negates robust ecosystem modeling that could be used to drive policy decisions, inform corporate actions, and stir public consciousness.

Yellowstone Ecological Research Center

Enter the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center (YERC)—Since 1993, YERC has conducted research in and around Yellowstone National Park on an ecologically diverse set of projects. Building on the projects and ecological expertise from nearly 3 decades of Adaptive Ecology work, YERC has turned its attention toward building a global platform to provide timely, quality, and science-based data, made publicly available and accessible.

The end goal is this to enable preventative healthcare for our planet’s ecosystems by providing tools to diagnose and keep them healthy.

EPIIC (Ecosystem Prognosis, Impacts, and Information Cooperative)

This platform, titled EPIIC (Ecosystem Prognosis, Impacts, and Information Cooperative), will be an open source, collaborative effort built on scalable, cloud-based services, to be used by people around the world to help ecosystems around the world in need of protection and restoration. For this initiative to succeed, it will require lots of data in a timely manner, a robust cloud-based infrastructure, and enthusiastic users of the data who will participate in modeling complex ecological systems. YERC’s approach to all three is a cooperative one: harnessing the power and potential of the crowd.

CLICK HERE for more details on what the crowd-driven data, platform development, and model creation will look like.

Watch it Come Together, Do Your Part

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Thank You

Thank you to all our sponsors for their contributions

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