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  ASM 2003

2003 LTER Site Byte

LTER Site: Central Arizona - Phoenix

Contributor: Corinna Gries and Peter McCartney (Oct 10, 2003)

Site Byte:

Our main management database is being restructured to accommodate generation of eml files while still serving the management functions for the site. Changes include adding a new layer of management tables that lets us merge other projects at CES such as IGER into the same content structure. We also completed a comprehensive set if intranet forms for participants to update their portions of this database. Some significant datasets acquired for the archive include a large soils dataset, specialized analyses related to our 200 sample monitoring, and climate data on 24 stations around Arizona that are now harvested daily from AZMET. CAP went from dead last to first in numbers of stations loaded into ClimDB thanks to the NSF supplement. We also used some of these funds to wrap our own data access webservice as a target for SDSC’s experimental ClimDB harvest system. We will update this file to match the latest version of their system.

Development on our website “Southwest Environmental Information Network - SEINet” (http://seinet.asu.edu) continues. Currently implemented functionality for LTER specific data include search for datasets and literature via Xanthoria, display of metadata, data download, data query, and visualization of data in the form of graphs and maps. The application is based on an integrated set of web services named Xylopia and relies on information from eml metadata files for encoding the request m submitted to these services. Nine biological collections catalogs can be queried with links to taxonomic name information, images, regional checklists, and identification keys. Parts of the SEINet application are being used for an K-12 educational application, in which students may ask questions, learn about hypotheses, basic statistics and graphing using data collected by themselves and LTER scientists. This project is a collaboration between IM staff and the Ecology Explorers, the CAP-LTER K-12 outreach program.

The Greater Phoenix Regional Atlas (http://www.gp2100.org/eatlas)has been developed and published in a printed and an electronic online version. 60 new spatial datasets, some based on LTER research, were added to the archive and eml catalog, and visitors of the atlas can navigate from the atlas to SEINet to view the eml and download the source data for each map.

In September 2002 we were awarded 440K from NSF ITR program to develop a local grid of web services to link data and urban ecological models from ASU, Arizona Department of Water Resources, and the Maricopa Association of Governements. This project builds on the previous BDI award. We also received funding as a participant in the SEEK ITR awarded to UNM, NCEAS,SDSC and KU. A graduate student from architecture planning will be working on ontology based solutions for temporal and spatial scaling of data as part of a workflow sequence.

In July we submitted a new proposal for 1.4 M to NSF BDI, this time together with U. Wisconsin, Oregon State U. and UNM. This proposal will again focus on web services as a platform for rapid integration of synthetic datasets and includes funds to enhance automated data validation.