Corresponding author: Corinna Gries (
Academic editor:
The Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) is a continuation and expansion of the original United Stated Long-Term Ecological Research Program (US-LTER) data repository which went into production in 2013. Building on decades of data management experience in LTER, EDI is addressing the challenge of publishing a diverse corpus of research data (
The FAIR principles serve as benchmarks for EDI’s operation and management: the data we curate are
The success of this approach is proven by the number and spatial and temporal extent of recent re-analyses and synthesis efforts of these data. Although formal data citations are not yet common practice, a Google Scholar search reveals over 400 journal articles crediting data re-use through an EDI DOI. However, despite improved data availability, researchers still report that the largest time investment in synthesis projects is discovering, cleaning and combining primary datasets until all data are completely understood and converted to a similar format. Starting with long-term biodiversity observation data EDI is addressing this issue by implementing a pre-harmonization of thematically similar data sets. Positioned between the data author’s specific data format and larger biodiversity data stores or synthesis projects, this approach allows uniform access without the loss of ancillary information. This pre-harmonization step may be accomplished by data managers because the dataset still contains all original information without any aggregation or science question specific decisions for data omission or cleaning. The data are still distributed into distinct datasets allowing for asynchronous updating of long-term observations. The addition of specific and standardized metadata makes them easily discoverable.
Corinna Gries
Biodiversity_Next 2019
US National Science Foundation, Advances in Biological Infrastructure
University of Wisconsin Madison, University of New Mexico, University of California Santa Barbara
None
This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation grants DBI-1629233 and DBI-1565103.
US National Science Foundation, Advances in Biological Infrastructure
Environmental Data Initiative
University of Wisconsin Madison, University of New Mexico, University of California Santa Barbara
None
The authors take on different roles in this project but are contributing to its success equally.