A story of data won, data lost and data re-found: the realities of ecological data preservation
Successful maintenance and accessibility of ecological data enables comprehension of the nature and causes of ecosystem change and makes informed action possible. However, much valuable data are not in institutional hands, and there are many pitfalls of non-institutional ecological data conservation. Interruptions to custodianship, outdated media, lost knowledge and the continuous evolution of species names makes conservation of such data challenging.
Category: National Science Foundation
Improving access to data through a standardized language
Finding data can be hard and a common solution to this problem has been to create search portals. However, finding these search portals is often challenging. DataONE partially addresses this problem by providing a unified search portal over its member repositories' holdings (many with their own search portals). But it remains a problem to find DataONE's search portal in the first place.