The Information Center for the Environment (ICE), housed within the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis, is a research laboratory that focuses on the brokerage of environmental information for better decision making in regards to resource management and policy formation.
ICE performs research and development on environmental information systems in partnership with a variety of state, federal, and international agencies and a number of environmental and land management organizations. The Center hosts a number of public environmental and natural resource databases, most available over the Internet, and provides technical support to decision makers in a number of areas of public policy. Research and development projects include, biodiversity in parks and reserves, invasive species, water quality in rivers, sources and management practices for non-point-source water pollution, protection of drinking water, watershed assessment and monitoring, floodplain restoration, land use planning and law, and stakeholder processes for watershed protection, as well as research into the next generation of remote sensing, geographic analysis, and semantic web technologies. ICE provides technology tool development and analysis for a variety of other research projects in ecology and natural resource management at the University of California and among state and federal agencies in California.
Center staff include individuals with many years of experience designing, using, and teaching technology and science-based courses, including Information Science, Ecology, Conservation Biology, Land Use Planning, Geographic Information Systems, Remote Sensing, Spatial Analysis, and Watershed Analysis. ICE is the California center for the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII), which coordinates U.S. and global information exchange for the U.S. government. Through NBII and other treaty-based initiatives, ICE has considerable experience in developing co-operative international networking and funding, including recent projects sponsored by the World Bank, the North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation, the Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network, the Man and the Biosphere Program (MAB), the Global Invasive Species Programme, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA).
