Software as a service for supporting biodiversity conservation decision making

Abstract

This paper presents e-clouds as a tool to support biodiversity decision making, offering a Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm to execute computing and technic intensive applications such as species distribution models. But mere access to these tools is not enough if usability and economy are not aligned with users interests. This article presents a friendly interface hiding all the complexities of using a public cloud infrastructure, containing an application supported by expert researchers, and an architecture behind the scenes that minimizes the cost of using such a computational and technical infrastructure, what results in a very attractive option for researchers and other stakeholders to get the most out of public clouds for their tasks. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.