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LTER Site Byte
LTER Site: Florida Coastal Everglades
Contributor: Linda Powell (Sep 05, 2006)
Site Byte:
In preparation for our 2006 funding renewal this past February, we made several enhancements to the Florida Coastal Everglades LTER program’s information management system (IMS). With the addition of three new servers to the IMS, Linda Powell (information manager) and Mike Rugge (project manager) have spent numerous hours incorporating the new equipment into the FCE network. Their focus over the past year has been on several important components of the IMS: 1) upgrading and expanding the FCE Oracle10g database, 2) upgrading and migrating information to the new FCE web server, 3) adding new web applications to the FCE website to facilitate information and project management and 4) converting all 270 FCE metadata files into tier 4 and 5 EML.
We have redesigned the ‘Research’ section of the FCE website by adding several new categories: 1) Information Management, 2) Projects and 3) Sampling. The Information Management System (IMS) (http://fcelter.fiu.edu/research/information_management/) is described in detail as it includes an IMS overview, the FCE data management and data submission policies, IMS statistics and a link to the EXCEL2EML tool. This information is also cross-referenced under the ‘Data Resources’ section.
Our ‘Projects’ section has greatly improved as we have organized specific projects and their related information using a series of tabs that give a ‘file folder’ look on the web page (http://fcelter.fiu.edu/research/projects/projects.htm?pid=1). For any given project, a user can easily find the abstract, research sites, personnel, sampling attributes, datasets and publications related to that specific project all on one web page. Additionally, projects can be searched by keyword, researcher or funding organization.
The ‘Sampling’ application (http://fcelter.fiu.edu/research/projects/sampling.htm) is extremely useful in information and project management. Users are able to search for sampling attributes by entering keywords or manually selecting an attribute of interest from a list. Once the selection has been made, a map with a series of tabs give users access to research site information, dataset listings and project information related to their sampling attribute selection. This feature greatly facilitates project management and site science. Users are able to easily access related information from one portal. For example, researchers interested in porewater salinity can enter the sampling attribute in the keyword field and the results will return a map of the FCE research sites where porewater salinity is collected as well as tabular links to all datasets containing porewater salinity and projects responsible for the collection of that attribute. The FCE LTER has a written policy whereby researchers beginning new projects must submit their project information, including proposed sampling attributes, to the information no later than six months after the beginning of such project. With a list of sampling characteristics, both real and proposed, this application allows the information manager to track which sampling attribute values have not been submitted to the FCE IMS in a timely fashion as there will be no dataset affiliated with the missing attributes.
Additionally, the FCE student organization now has a section on our home page that delivers information on ongoing events and activities and links to important student features such as graduate student tools, links to other student organizations, poster logo information and student presentations, dissertations, and theses. There is also a ‘Featured FCE Student’ section that highlights the student’s background and interests.
This coming year our focus will be on building a web-based query interface for FCE data values and adding a graphing application so that FCE researchers can graph their query results in real-time. To date, our data are available in ASCII files only. Many sampling attributes, like Total Phosphorus, can be found in several different flat files. Users must download each file to compile one Total Phosphorus data table for the FCE research sites. Allowing users to query download or graph the database for specific sampling attributes across all data files will be a welcomed addition to our website.
The FCE IMS has fully adopted the LTER network metadata standard Ecological Metadata Language (EML) and one hundred percent (100%) of the FCE tabular data are accompanied by a Level 4/5 (Data Identification, Discovery, Evaluation, Access and Integration) EML (XML) metadata documents. FCE EML documents are harvested daily to the LTER network metacat XML database.
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