Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments (SKOPE) is an NSF-funded effort to bring paleoenvironmental data to researchers and the public through an intuitive, map-based user interface, and also to improve the capacity of researchers to do reproducible paleoenvironmental research. The project is a collaboration between Crow Canyon, Washington State University, Arizona State University, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

In response to a specific query, SKOPE will extract the latest data from diverse online databases. Using explicit and repeatable procedures, it will process the data to yield a cutting-edge synthesis of environmental information specifically tailored to the user’s request. Initially the tool will be developed for the Southwest U.S. over the last 2000 years, but it will be designed to be readily extended to other places and times.