Finding the Forest in the Trees The Challenge of Combining Diverse Environmental Data (1995) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-11
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At the national level, these international research initiatives are supported through the federal interagency Global Change Research Program. Global change research, by its nature and scope, is inherently complex.
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Because data from each discipline and subdiscipline are organized into data sets and databases that frequently possess unique or special attributes, their effective interfacing can be difficult. Sound practices in database management are required to deal effectively with problems of complexity in global change studies and other large interdisciplinary research and assessment projects.
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Addressing Barriers Deriving from the Data The spatial and temporal scales of the disciplines important to en~riror~mental research vary enormously. Such variation was certainly typical of the ecological and geophysical data sets that were reviewed In this study.
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The committee found that differences in scientific conventions among disciplines can be a severe impediment to data interfacing, significantly increasing the costs of achieving compatibility among data sets and in some cases preventing it completely. Some of these differences stem from fundamental dissimilarities in study design or purpose and others from traditional practice that varies from discipline to discipline.
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Agencies that perform or support environmental research and assessment generally, and global change research particularly, should identify and define key ecological data sets that do not exist but are important to their mission. A careful review should be made of options for finding, rescuing, or creating these crucial data, and funding should be set aside to implement the most feasible optionts)
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Program managers and data managers, in their interactions with and training of environmental scientists, should emphasize how state-of-the-practice data management can provide immediate and longlasting benefits to scientists, particularly those engaged in interdisciplinary research. At the same time, data managers need to be a part of the conceptual team from the beginning of a project and have equal status with principal investigators.
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Recommendation 12. The agencies involved in supporting and carrying out interdisciplinary research should investigate the possibility of establishing one or more ecosystem data and information analysis centers to facilitate the exchange of data and access to data, help improve and maintain the quality of valuable data sets, and provide ~ralueadded services.
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The committee found instances In the case studies where data sets had to be discarded because Investigators did not provide the documentation reseeded for others to make use of them. It is important for researchers to understand that the incremental cost of including the necessary documentation at the time of data collection is small ~ comparison with the cost of attempting to reconstruct it retrospectively at the end of the project, or long after it has beers completed, which may be prohibitive in cost or impossible to do.
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, data managers should investigate the feasibility of incorporating an audit trail into the data themselves. The committee concludes that far too many environmental research projects give insufficient attention, in either the planning or the implementation stage, to the long-term archiving of their data sets.
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There are no well-established and widely accepted protocols to assist scientists in deciding which data should be archived, ~ what formats they should be stored, arid where and how they should be archived to maximize access for potential future users. Further, in several cases the committee found little attention giver to the long-term maintenance of data sets once they were archived.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 11 4. Proceed incrementally.
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