|
|
LTER Site Byte
LTER Site: Shortgrass Steppe
Contributor: Nicole Kaplan (Sep 18, 2006)
Site Byte:
Over several weeks, the IM Team and SGS-LTER Staff have focused on setting up new administrative and staff office at Colorado State University. Staff and the IM Team have been responsible for inventorying and organizing legacy data and reports dating back to the 1930s, located across six offices and over a dozen filing cabinets. We have used this opportunity to create a library of historic International Biome Project and LTER data and reports, and prepare older, richer metadata for entry into our database. These efforts will help preserve the history of project goals, and document the evolution of ecological studies and data that spans over forty years at the SGS field research site. We hope this will serve as a useful resource for LTER Researchers in the future.
The IM Team now consists of Nicole Kaplan, full-time IM Team Leader, Bob Fynn, half-time IT/GIS Manager, a half-time student web developer and two quarter time data entry students. We continue to work on improving data discovery, delivery and interoperability tools within the SGS Information Management system. Our efforts have been guided by both internal evaluation of our strengths and weaknesses, and an external mid-term review, which occurred last summer by National Science Foundation. We have continued to work with Inigo San Gil at the LTER Network office to implement a newly designed relational database management system (RDBMS) and PERL and XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) scripts that now contain and generate level 5 EML (Ecological Metadata Content) content. The IM Team is working with our core Staff and Principal Investigators to enhance metadata for our current long-term studies to Level 5, which describes tables and attributes in addition to project objectives, methods, locations, and principal investigators.
We are also constructing new information delivery tools within a redesigned SGS-LTER website that serves metadata and other information from the new RDBMS. Nicole has been involved with developing and adopting Recommendations for Website Design within the LTER Network. We are taking into account these recommendations, applying a Java script for menu navigation, installing website search tools and using Macromedia (Adobe) Fireworks for displaying images from the field site.
Bob provides support for SGS-LTER researchers and students in various aspects of GIS including gathering data with GPS equipment and imagery, assisting with GIS model development for their particular research, and providing GIS data and maps for field work and modeling. He has also extended existing programs for analysis of SGS-LTER data.
|
