Collaborative Research: Environmental Data Initiative: Sustaining the Legacy of Scientific Data

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The Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) facilitates the publication of environmental data generated by publicly funded research projects. With a mission to ensure the long-term viability and legacy of publicly funded scientific data, EDI is committed to making environmental data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). EDI provides support, training, and resources to help archive and publish high-quality data and metadata, providing accountability and transparency to data providers, while opening the door to answering new questions through Big Data analyses. EDI is actively engaged in the national and international community of data curators to promote data management best practices and stewardship. Programs served include, but are not limited to, Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB), Organization for Biological Field Stations (OBFS), MacroSystems Biology (MSB), and Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) within the NSF Division of Environmental Biology.EDI is a collaborative effort among data practitioners, software developers, and research scientists at the University of New Mexico and the University of Wisconsin-Madison to provide a comprehensive data archive and publication service for ecological researchers. To achieve the overall mission of EDI, the project focuses on (1) curation and training services tailored to the needs of the environmental sciences community and (2) the support and maintenance of a state-of-the-art data repository. EDI services include direct management of data documentation by practitioners experienced in environmental and ecological data science, community training in data management practices and data archive workflows for contributing data to the repository, and software development for the creation of scientific metadata. Team members are experienced in data science best practices and software frameworks, including RStudio and Jupyter Notebooks, and are certified data and software Carpentry instructors. The PASTA+ software behind the EDI data repository is based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The EDI data repository is designed to be simple, durable, extensible, and congruent with the FAIR guiding principles. EDI has created a feature-rich, public-facing Data Portal that provides a user-friendly web-browser interface to the repository, allowing users to evaluate and upload data, and discover and view data and associated metadata. The Data Portal also serves as a complete reference implementation in Java for guiding other software developers on the use of the PASTA+ application programming interface which enables developers to interact directly with the repository at its lowest level. These technologies and services are designed to promote the persistence and use of scientific data and to ensure that all environmental scientists have access to high-quality data curation and publication services. The EDI repository may be found at https://environmentaldatainitiative.org/.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.