This workshop will bring together researchers and information managers involved in preparing data for synthesis. The LTER is known for its publicly available long-term observational data, which are becoming increasingly valuable for reuse in modeling, for ground truthing, or in meta analysis answering entirely new research questions. However, such re-analyses to document and understand processes and trajectories of environmental change require special skills, tools, and experience. For instance, the historic context as described by metadata or auxiliary data as well as typical ecological sampling approaches, problems, and variations need to be well understood to prevent errors and misinterpretation of these data. This session will provide short vignettes on insights gained from re-analyzing complex environmental data and participants will brainstorm on general approaches that can be learned from individual experiences. What is missing to make this easier.
Short presentations will be given by:
S. Earl, W. Wieder, D. Pierson: Reflecting on SoDaH, insights from the development of a scripted, extensible tool suite and workflow to harmonize soil-chemistry data
J. Blanchard: Challenges in integrating microbial environmental genomes into ecological databases
M. Balk: Semantic workflows for findability, ontologies for standardization and interoperability, structured knowledge for data extraction
A. Hudson: Harmonizing climate change and ecosystem response across US-LTER drylands
K.J. Jankowski: Getting to harmonious: Lessons learned from synthesizing long-term riverine silica data from across the globe
M. Gooseff: issues and lessons learned from harmonizing the data at your own LTER site
M. Dietze: Synthesis lessons learned from model-data fusion
