LTER Site Byte

LTER Site: Shortgrass Steppe

Contributor: Nicole Kaplan (Jul 21, 2005)

Site Byte:

The Shortgrass Steppe LTER Information Management (IM) team is working on projects to improve support for local and network science, and access to more integrated, metadata, data and other information. The team currently consists of Nicole Kaplan, who works closely with Bob Flynn, GIS and IT manager. A position on the team has been created to support database and web development, which is currrently being advertised for a comupter science student. It is important to balance our commitment to site support, Network initiatives and outside ecoinformatics projects. The SGS Principal Investigators are discussing the interpretation and application of newly adopted LTER Network data access and use policies. Nicole is involved with the Network IM and broader ecoinformatics communities as a member of LTER IMexec and Website Design Working Group Leader.
The SGS Information Management team has plans to improve on-line searching capabilities for data and metadata by developing new web site tools. They have recognized the need for better integration of related data sets, spatial and non-spatial data, publications and other research information. Recommendations from the LTER Network Wesite Design Working Group will be considered when implementating the second generation SGS web site (Kaplan 2005). Our field staff are in the process of collecting Global Positioning System coordinates to complete our spatial coverage of most legacy and all current long-term and short-term data stes. We are making progress toward integrating our non-spatial and spatial data sets, to enhance management of study impacts on field sites and support data discovery with level 2 Ecological Metadata Lanaguage from the SGS database.
Metadata in the SGS Information Management System vary in richness, since fifteen percent of our data sets are legacy data sets from the USFS and IBP. Because of this, information required to meet the new LTER standard metadata content of EML may not be available. Metadata for more recent and current SGS data sets can be submitted directly to the RDBMS by students and PIs via web-based forms. We recognize the importance of maintaining robust metadata to ensure the usability of data in the future and are making efforts to conform our metadata tables in the RDBMS to EML according to the EML Best Practices document. We have a strategy to bring metadata in the RDBMS to Level 2 EML by exporting metadata content in XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) and converting the XML to EML with XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) conversion scripts. Experts at the LTER Network Office have contributed to our efforts by providing licenses for software tools, example code, and tools for harvesting SGS metadata to a Metacat, a remote ecological metadata catalog. The SGS has also contributed to a community model metadata management system in RDBMS that is being developed and implemented at various LTER sites by the LTER Network office. Lastly, a GIS EML tool developed at the CAP (Central Arizona Phoenix) LTER site was tested on SGS GIS metadata to generate EML.
The IM Team is developing a suite of programs to improve QAQC practices at SGS, called the Matrix. The Matrix currently checks and formats meteorological data for submission to CLIMdb (http://www.fsl.orst.edu/climdb/) and is being expanded to support data tables produced by floral dynamics research, which contains over sixty percent of our studies. The IM team will continue to work with researchers to develop tools to more efficiently process, quality check and publish their data with high integrity.
Nicole continues to participate in ecoinformatics community projects, such as the Canopy Databank Project (http://canopy.evergreen.edu/bcd/home.asp) at The Evergreen State College. LTER IMs are contributing to the development of templates for data entry, analysis and synthesis of aboveground net primary production data collected at distinct grassland sites. Synthesis of nutrient enrichment data is being demonstrated by the Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (http://seek.ecoinformatics.org/) project and includes SGS data and input for constructing ontologies of aboveground grassland vegetation measurements.

References

Kaplan, N.E., C. Gries, and E.C. Meléndez-Colom (2005) Evaluating First Generation LTER Site Web Sites: Assessing our audience, meeting their needs, and making recommendations for the future. In DataBits: An electronic newsletter for Information Managers, Spring 2005 Issue.

Web design by Wade Sheldon, Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER