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2003 LTER Site Byte

LTER Site: Kellogg Biological Station

Contributor: Tim Bergsma (Aug 05, 2003)

Site Byte:

Information management at the KBS LTER for the past year has mostly been a balance between database development and technology development. Major effort was devoted to recasting 12 years of productivity data as a tightly-regulated database. A new database was designed to accomodate exploration of 5 years-worth of forest tree diameter data. Major modifications were made to the weather database, to facilitate transparent annotation of incoming data. Participation in DTOC and ClimDB was "revamped".

On the technology side, web-accessibility of data was reconfigured such that all data is served as XML, but styled by default for web viewing. This change made it easier, for instance, to serve the same data to ClimDB and to our own site by invoking different stylesheets. Formerly, metadata marked as "priviledged access" was visible only to data managers; a bifurcation in the metadata stream was institutionalized so that all metadata is visible either on the internet or on our intranet. Our weather station became wireless: solar panels and spread-spectrum radios mean no more phone lines or power lines! Internet connectivity to the datalogger now allows hourly updates to the weather data preview (http://lter.kbs.msu.edu/Data/weather.jsp). Major initiatives to improve GIS and Genomics data infrastructure were funded. KBS's wireless network was expanded to include 802.11b coverage for the LTER site.