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GOAL 3: develop or enhance data management systems

Many of our network partners are at or beyond their capacity to support more volunteers.  Until they improve their systems for capturing and managing data, they cannot expand their programs.  Our two main goals are thus to develop data entry and management systems and create mobile field units for data collection.

Several programs already have a strong data management foundation, and they will continue to develop those systems. Currently, transect programs need the most immediate help. The collective group of current and forming transect programs decided that they are going to join forces and work towards developing one, shared system to handle data entry, quality control, data strorage, access, and visualizations. To do this, we are partnering with Butterflies and Moths of North America and also working with Nature Serve to develop a data management system that will work for all programs and transfer easily to new programs. We are using as a basis their system for developing transferable templates and database systems (illustrated at right).

The largest monitoring program, NABA, is also working to upgrade their data management systems and will be focused especially on developing systems for data sharing and visualizations.

DEVELOPING A SHARED DATA STANDARD: One of our main goals is to develop a shared data standard so that our data are more comparable and follow strict metadata standards so that they can be easily reused and also will be formatted to be added to any large-scale appropriate repository. We plan to adapt the Bird Monitoring Data Exchange (developed by the Cornell Lab), an extension of DarwinCore, as a shared data standard between programs. By adapting this data standard, we will ensure that our data have maximum utility in perpetuity. We will ultimately be able to make sure appropriate data are able to be uploaded to the Global Biological Information Facility (GBIF) and that we are able to ultimately become (or join) a Member Node for DataONE, a new large-scale scheme to provide access and long-term storage for all biodiversity and environmental data. 

GOAL 1: to track all North American monitoring projects and strive to include all programs in our network GOAL 2: to strandardize protocols and data as much as possible GOAL 3: to develop or enhance data management systems GOAL 4: to build data download and visualization tools GOAL 5: to expand program participation

 
Comments and questions should be directed to Leslie Ries (lries@umd.edu)

This project is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF award 1147049) to the University of Maryland and the Socio-environmental Synthesis Center.