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  ASM 2003

2003 LTER Site Byte

LTER Site: Sevilleta LTER

Contributor: Kristin Vanderbilt (Sep 15, 2003)

Site Byte:

‘Twas a prosperous and productive year for Sevilleta LTER Information Management. For the first time in years, IM was permitted to request new hardware as part of a supplement grant, and as a result a SUN A1000 hardware RAID will soon be attached to Sevilleta’s E450 SUN server, adding approximately 400GB of much needed space. Sevilleta IM also received funding via the ClimDB/HydroDB initiative to hire a student programmer who automated the Sevilleta system for harvesting climate data and updating ClimDB.

The Sevilleta field crew has adopted HP Jornada 720 handheld computers for data collection to increase data management efficiency. Scripts have been written to QA/QC the data after it has been downloaded from palmtop to PC and to commit it to MySQL. Integration of MySQL into Sevilleta’s information management system represents Sevilleta’s move toward reliance on RDBMS rather than only ASCII files for data storage and manipulation.

The most exciting development in Sevilleta IM has been the creation of a new web site. Marshall White of NET led us through a tremendously helpful process for preparing a design document that described the goals, audience, expected user experience, and content organization of the new web site. This document was then the basis for structuring the new website, which has more of a network character (the old URL http://sevilleta.unm.edu has been replaced by http://sev.lternet.edu) and features utilities developed by the network office such as a search engine and connection to the LTER personnel directory. The web site has been implemented in PostNuke, a content management system.