2001 LTER Site Flash

NTL

Barbara Benson and Dave Balsiger

North Temperate Lakes LTER (NTL) information manager Barbara Benson was a co-organizer (with Dick Olson, Tim Fahey, and Alan Knapp) of a workshop to advance the sharing and synthesis of ecological data through the development of guidelines for data sharing and integration. The workshop was held at the Sevilleta LTER Field Station June 14-16, 2001 and was a follow-up activity to an All Scientist Meeting 2000 workshop. Products from the workshop include a proposal (by Fahey and Knapp) to NET for funds to write a book on principles and standards for measuring net primary productivity, a draft manuscript titled "Synthesis in Ecology: Approaches, Principles, and Procedures" to be submitted to Bioscience (Michener, Olson, Benson et al.), and a draft of guidelines for data synthesis activity to be submitted to the LTER Coordinating Committee.

The global ice phenology database for the northern hemisphere, developed at NTL in collaboration with an international group of scientists (Lake Ice Analysis Group), was transferred to the National Snow and Ice Data Center for public access and long-term archival. NTL information management staff coordinated the transfer and consulted with NSIDC staff on quality control and design of a web-based user interface.

The NTL-LTER maintains its data in an Oracle database. This year the NTL database was expanded to include additional historic and regional data sets. We also implemented a database table for the NTL plankton samples archived at the University of Wisconsin Zoology Museum.

We have created a discussion board using Discus Professional software on the web site of the Biocomplexity Project, an NSF funded project based primarily through the Center for Limnology and closely associated with the NTL-LTER project. Researchers wanted their own "sandbox" in which they could collaborate with specified other researchers on analysis and manuscripts. The sandboxes on the discussion board are intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas, conversations, files, graphics, etc within a group of users. The widely used Discus Professional software (www.discusware.com) is relatively inexpensive, quite straightforward to implement and pleasingly feature rich.

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