The Santa Barbara Coastal Ecosystem (SBC) LTER site was established
in April 2000, though research in this area has been ongoing for decades.
The site is typical of many semi-arid regions in that it includes a large
number of watersheds with episodic stream flow that vary in size and land
use. The primary research objective of the SBC LTER is to investigate the
relative importance of land vs. ocean processes in structuring giant kelp
(
Macrocystis pyrifera) forest ecosystems for different conditions
of land use and climate.
In our first year, we have established and initiated data collection
at a set of core sites (including the installation of instrumentation in
a set of coastal watersheds, nearshore rocky reefs, and offshore ocean environments).
We are currently developing our Schoolyard LTER Program in partnership
with the Santa Barbara Community Environmental Council (CEC), and we maintain
an active and
rewarding REU program. Additionally, we have purchased our server, launched
our website (
http://sbc.lternet.edu/),
and
implemented a file-sharing system to facilitate data sharing and
archiving.
Our IM Staff, consisting of Wei-Yee Luan (SBC-LTER Information Manager)
and Jeff Shima (SBC-LTER Research/Outreach Coordinator) have been working
closely with a “Data Oversight Committee” comprised of several
SBC-LTER PIs, an LTER graduate student, and Chris Jones (IM for PISCO, another
long-term ecological study based at U.C. Santa Barbara) to (1) define an
initial set of “core data” and (2) construct a relational data
base
to support these data.
The SBC-LTER must manage data from a variety of systematic domains
of study (land, ocean, reef) and data set types (point data, satellite imagery,
GIS layer, etc.) in a reasonable and transparent manner. The scientific
goals of the SBC-LTER require us to answer questions that cross these domain
boundaries. This means the SBC-LTER data management system must support
database queries across these domains. Hence, the data management team
will take a
query-centric view to the management of SBC-LTER
core data.
We have recently delineated our expectations and plan of attack
for our database in a draft ¼Mission Statement¼, which can be
downloaded from
http://sbc.lternet.edu/data/.
We look forward to constructive feedback on our “Mission
Statement”, and to learning how other LTER sites are tackling database
development/management.