RUI: Databases and Database Tools for Canopy Science - What Trees Can Teach Us about Integrating Database Use into the Research Process

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This Project will develop database tools that will enhance the ability of researchers in one emerging and interdisciplinary field -- forest canopy studies -- to collect, analyze, link, and archive their data.The field of forest canopies is currently in its adolescence, and is growing rapidly in terms of interest from the scientific community, the general public, and policy makers. Coordinated study of the canopy is beginning at shared research sites, but canopy researchers view their major obstacle to answer emerging questions as the lack of database tools that would allow them to gather their data in harmonized ways and to link their data to enable comparative studies.Previous NSF-sponsored collaborative research developed preliminary database tools and datasets, based on pilot studies of forest canopy structure/function relationships at the Wind River Canopy Crane Research Facility. These tools included data models, a metadata database, and a web-based project inventory for a multi-PI global climate change study.This project develops these tools further by gathering archived and current data to test hypotheses on canopy structure/function relationships in a gradient of coniferous forests of differing structural diversity, ranging from very structurally complex (the late-successional primary forests) to very structurally simple (young monospecific plantation forests). These tools will be extended to incorporate forests of different structural constituents from two other forest types in Panama and Australia, both of which have a canopy crane facility and support collaborative canopy research. Researchers at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, the Forest Science Database Center at Oregon State University, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and the Centre for Tropical Forest Studies will participate as part of a collaboration.The project will disseminate findings through workshops and through the development of a "virtual center" of canopy research, building upon the existing International Canopy Network which is housed at Evergreen State. Research activities will be incorporated into opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students.