Table of Contents
Tools & Training: Data Organization
Recommended Reading: Data Organization
Tools & Training: Data Analysis
Recommended Reading: Data Analysis
Tools & Training: Data Sharing and Archiving
Recommended Reading:Data Sharing and Archiving
Data Quality and Documentation
Tools & Training: Data Quality and Documentation
Recommended Reading: Data Quality and Documentation
Tools & Training: Data Management Planning
Recommended Reading: Data Management Planning
eCommons: Cornell's Repository
eCommons is Cornell's digital repository, which "provides long-term access to a broad range of Cornell-related digital content of enduring value. It is open to anyone affiliated with Cornell University (faculty, staff, students, or groups/organizations) as a place to store, organize, preserve, index, and redistribute materials in digital formats that may be useful for educational, scholarly, research, or historical purposes."
Services at Cornell for Data Sharing and Archiving
- Data Sharing Best PracticesThe RDSMG's guide to best practices for data publication - "strategies by which an investigator might make their data available to a broader audience."
- Data Sharing ServicesThe Cornell Data Services's list of Cornell data sharing services for Cornell researchers.
- Electronic Lab NotebookNeed to keep your lab group organized and share materials? Try LabArchives! "LabArchives is an electronic lab notebook used to store, organize, share, and publish laboratory data. It can be used for research and teaching."
Sharing and Archiving Your Data
Sharing and archiving your data so that you, others in your lab group, and researchers at other institutions can find and access your data, now and in the long term, is increasingly becoming a funding requirement, as well as being good practice for research in an interdisciplinary world. There are a growing number of repositories where you can deposit your data, from Cornell's eCommons to publishers' sites to disciplinary data repositories. Below are some useful directories to repositories. There are also a lot of general factors to consider in evaluating digital repositories, some of which we will consider in class.
Examples of Data Repositories in Natural Resources
- DataOne Data resourcesDataOne's resources on finding, contributing, using, and citing data from its network and beyond.
- DataverseEnjoy full control over your data. Receive web visibility, academic credit, and increased citation counts. A personal dataverse is easy to set up, allows you to display your data on your personal website, can be branded uniquely as your research program, makes your data more discoverable to the research community, and satisfies data management plans. Want to set up your personal dataverse?
- Dryad"Dryad is a nonprofit organization and an international repository of data underlying scientific and medical publications."
- GLEON (Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network)"GLEON is a grassroots network of limnologists, ecologists, information technology experts, and engineers
who have a common goal of building a scalable, persistent network of lake ecological observatories." - Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social ResearchIf you have social science data, ICPSR is a premier data archive in the US and Cornell is a member institution. Data deposit for both quantitative and qualitative data is available at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/deposit/index.jsp. After registering, Cornell users can view and download over 500,000 digital data files, including many relating to labor, organizational behavior, and public policy. The data sets are often connected with academic studies.
- KNB: Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity"The Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) is a national network intended to facilitate ecological and environmental research on biocomplexity. For scientists, the KNB is an efficient way to discover, access, interpret, integrate and analyze complex ecological data from a highly-distributed set of field stations, laboratories, research sites, and individual researchers."
- LTER Data Portal"Data are one of the most valuable products of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network program. The LTER Network seeks to inform the broader scientific community by providing open access to well designed and well documented databases via a Network-wide information system."
- Mercury"The mission of the ORNL DAAC [Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center] is to assemble, distribute, and provide data services for a comprehensive archive of terrestrial biogeochemistry and ecological dynamics observations and models to facilitate research, education, and decision-making in support of NASA's Earth Science."
- National Ecological Observatory Network"The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a continental-scale observatory designed to gather and provide 30 years of ecological data on the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on natural resources and biodiversity. NEON is a project of the National Science Foundation, with many other U.S. agencies and NGOs cooperating."
- NatureServe"NatureServe and its network of member programs are a leading source for reliable scientific information about species and ecosystems of the Western Hemisphere. This site serves as a portal for accessing several types of publicly available biodiversity data."
- NOAA Paleoclimatology"NOAA Paleoclimatology is a branch of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. Paleo data come from natural sources such as tree rings, ice cores, corals, and ocean and lake sediments-- and extend the archive of weather and climate back hundreds to millions of years. NOAA Paleo provides data and information scientists need to understand natural climate variability and future climate change. We also operate the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology which distributes data contributed by scientists around the world."
- PANGAEA"The information system PANGAEA is operated as an Open Access library aimed at archiving, publishing and distributing georeferenced data from earth system research. The system guarantees long-term availability of its content through a commitment of the operating institutions."
- VegBank"VegBank is the vegetation plot database of the Ecological Society of America's Panel on Vegetation Classification. VegBank consists of three linked databases that contain (1) the actual plot records, (2) vegetation types recognized in the U.S. National Vegetation Classification and other vegetation types submitted by users, and (3) all plant taxa recognized by ITIS/USDA as well as all other plant taxa recorded in plot records. Vegetation records, community types and plant taxa may be submitted to VegBank and may be subsequently searched, viewed, annotated, revised, interpreted, downloaded, and cited."