TERN CoESRA

CoESRA Virtual Desktop

A free cloud-based virtual workbench that gives you as a researcher a portable and powerful computational environment to perform and share complex data analysis workflows. With CoESRA you can work globally with your team to run experiments and share your work.

CoESRA (Collaborative Environment for Scholarly Research and Analysis) is developed by TERN in collaboration with many partners.

CoESRA allows researchers to perform complex analyses without having to set up the experiment from scratch and worry about having enough resources to run the analysis. It provides the infrastructure to not only re-use data but also tools for data manipulations, scripts for data visualisation and algorithms for analysis processes. Once a specific analysis is conducted, the entire process chain can be stored and shared with other scientists improving the reproducibility and repeatability of the experiments. Finally, the workflow can be published to Research Data Australia (RDA).

The following are some of the features of CoESRA:

Create simulations

Create, execute and
share simulations

Save time & delegate

Access re-usable Kepler scientific workflows and with Nimrod
K distribute jobs

Connect globally

Connect with your team or
collaborate with researchers
from around the world

Store data

Store data for private
and public use

Platform

The Collaborative Environment for Scholarly Research and Analysis (CoESRA) is a cloud-based virtual desktop platform accessible from a web browser. The virtual desktop consists of tools like Biodiverse GUI, Canopy (IDE for python and Notebook), Jupyter
Lab, Kepler scientific workflow, Knime, LibreOffice Math, Macroeco Desktop, OpenRefine, Panoply, QGIS & RStudio and access to ample storage. All of these tools are accessible by logging into CoESRA using an Australian Access Federation (AAF) or Google account.

Applications and Tools available

Project Portfolio

Listed below are three case studies that demonstrate how CoESRA has been used in different projects. These case studies have a brief description, a map of the workflow and instructions on how to access and run the workflow.

  1. IUCN Ecosystem Risk Assessment of Mountain Ash Forests
  2. IUCN Ecosystem Risk Assessment of Georgina gidgee woodlands in central Australia
  3. Conservation planning using Marxan

Citation

To cite any scientific workflows or analyses developed or hosted in CoESRA, please use the following statement:
Creator (Year): “title of the workflow” was run on “date” in TERN CoESRA Virtual Desktop (www.tern.org.au/coesra), workflow URL from myExperiment.org. Creator (Year): “title of the analysis program” was run on “date” in TERN CoESRA Virtual Desktop (www.tern.org.au/coesra).

If you want to acknowledge CoESRA in any publications, please use the following statement:
This research is undertaken with the assistance of resources from the TERN CoESRA Virtual Desktop.

Please cite the following article if you want to reference CoESRA:
Guru, S.,Hanigan,I. C.,Nguyen, H. A.,Burns,E.,Stein, J.,Blanchard, W.,Lindenmayer, D.,Clancy, T. (2016). Development of a cloud-based platform for reproducible science: A case study of an IUCN Red List of Ecosystems Assessment. Ecological Informatics, 36, 221-230. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2016.08.003.