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H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest July 31, 2001 Don Henshaw, Theresa Valentine, Gody Spycher

Information management personnel at the H. J. Andrews (Don Henshaw, Gody Spycher, Theresa Valentine, and Suzanne Remillard) are continuing development of an information system based on a structured metadata database. The metadata database has been established in compliance with emerging national standards for metadata (LTER/FGDC/NBII Biological Data Profile). The system consists of a catalog of research products such as study databases, spatial databases, and publications, and will permit searching for these products by author, theme keywords, locations, and species. The system also enables close integration of spatial and tabular data types. Features of this system will be implemented through web interfaces to facilitate public identification and access of information products.

The Andrews Forest LTER site has developed and maintained the Forest Science Data Bank (FSDB) to store LTER and other ecological data sets. The FSDB is a long-term data repository and features structured metadata tables and catalogs to allow generic programs to assist in data management tasks such as web page generation, quality assurance checking, and writing metadata and quality assurance reports. We are currently in the process of converting the FSDB study data and metadata, as well as the generic tools, into our new information system. The FSDB has been implemented in Visual Foxpro, and Foxpro's ability to connect with SQL Server through ODBC using remote views has greatly facilitated this conversion.

The new information system (that we affectionately call FLIMSY – FSDB LTER Interactive Metadata System) resides on a dedicated server (SQL Server 7.0) and forms the basis for dynamic web access to personnel information, data sets, and bibliographies. Web prototypes for searching for publications by personnel, theme, place, and taxonomic keywords are now functional. New web prototypes under development will allow LTER members to submit and update metadata for research study data, and will allow members to update their own personnel information. Current prototypes are written in Active Server Pages (asp) and run on an NT IIS Web Server. Our primary web server remains a Sun Ultra 10 running Netscape Web server software. Supplemental funding from the National Science Foundation has been essential in the development of this new system.

Migrating the FSDB into the new system has afforded us the opportunity to review and clean study metadata, and to add new metadata elements not included in earlier standards. Later this year we are planning to redesign how our study metadata gets published to the web, and plan to have this content as well as downloadable study metadata reports created dynamically. These improvements will be timely as this is a proposal-writing year for LTER5.

Currently the spatial databases are being documented to FGDC standards, additional data is being incorporated into the system, the capability to search spatial data is being explored and tested, and linkages are being developed between FSDB datasets and GIS datasets. Regional data is being compiled for the HJ Andrews Book and will be available over the Internet for other users. We continue to receive requests for older, undocumented data, and are attempting to document this data if it is still useful. In the next year we should complete our map of all Andrews study site locations, have more updated GIS data available on the web, and have more Internet mapping capability.

The Andrews remains very active with intersite activities. Don Henshaw has been active with the development of HydroDB, an intersite hydrology database with 23 participating Forest Service sites (6 LTER sites are included). HydroDB is similar to ClimDB and uses the same "centributed" approach. Don has also participated in IM Executive Committee meetings, a data synthesis workshop, and presented an Information Management talk at Coweeta LTER's annual retreat.