Documents — Symposia and Paper Sessions

Published proceedings from Ecological Information Management Conference held September 2008 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Secondary Science Teaching in Rural Michigan – A Model Program for Teacher Retention and Renewal

LTER, BIO/DEB – NSF’s LTER Program Began in 1980 with 6 sites, Now: 24 field sites, 1 Network Office, 6 USFS collaborative sites (other agencies), $19M annual budget ($16M core), 5 NSF Directorates contribute to core funding

Center for Biology Education, UW-Madison & NTL-LTER – Seamless Environmental Education at North Temperate Lakes: K-12 students, teachers, and graduate students working together

Secondary Science Teaching in Rural Michigan – A Model Program for Teacher Retention and Renewal (powerpoint)

LTER Education Highlights (powerpoint)

Karen S. Baker and James W. Brunt and David Blankman – A site description directory plays a central role as a catalog for a network of research sites. Such a directory represents a keystone element in an information management system. A directory contributes to community communications both through documentation of member information and relationships as well as through design feedback elicited from participants in the ongoing process of developing the catalog system.

Peter H. MCCARTNEY and Matthew B. JONES – Metadata provide information on the structure and meaning of data. It is one of the most basic components for building a scalable, networked infrastructure for accessing ecological data. Several partnering groups from ecology have collaborated to define a standardized format for metadata that is machine-parseable and extensible.

Efforts to Link Ecological Metadata with Bacterial Gene Sequences at the Sapelo Island Microbial Observatory Wade M. SHELDON, Mary Ann MORAN and James T. HOLLIBAUGH – The existence of public databases for archiving genetic sequence data, such as GenBank and the Ribosomal Database Project, coupled with the availability of standardized sequence alignment and comparison tools has led to rapid advances in the field of bacterial genetics and systematics.

John Vande Castle, Deana Pennington, Tony Fountain and Cherri Pancake – Information managers at ecological research sites grapple with the complexity of diverse and heterogeneous datasets. The effective management of large geospatial datasets requires extensive hardware, software, and human resources that are often beyond the capabilities of smaller institutions.

William K. MICHENER, James W. BRUNT and Kristin L. VANDERBILT – Scientists within the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network have provided leadership in ecological informatics since the inception of LTER in 1980.

John H. PORTER and Kenneth W. RAMSEY, Jr. – Integration of data is critical to achieving new levels of understanding of ecological systems and processes. Typically, data integration is achieved only through a painstaking manual process that rules out large-scale integration.

Dan J. SMITH, Barbara J. BENSON, and David F. BALSIGER – Many sites conducting ecological research must routinely manage a diverse suite of datasets and make them accessible to researchers. This paper presents an approach to creating an ecological data query system that dynamically creates predefined dataset query interfaces for managed datasets. The query interfaces are created from stored dataset metadata and query creation metadata and include only those field selections and filtering options identified as relevant for the specified dataset.

Through the Looking Glass: What do we see, What have we learned, What can we share? Information Management at the Shortgrass Steppe Long Term Ecological Research Site Susan G. Stafford, Nicole E. Kaplan, and Christopher W. Bennett – This paper documents the development of a successful information management system at a Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site that has a rich history of data collection and management. landscape.

Eda C. Meléndez-Colom and Karen S. Baker – A common goal of information management systems (IMS) is to share information among its users and originators. These systems are usually implemented by project managers and sponsors.

Donald L. Henshaw, Gody Spycher, and Suzanne M. Remillard – Many tasks and issues are encountered in the process of converting a scientific databank containing multiple legacy and long-term study databases into an integrated data production and distribution system.

Judith Bayard Cushing, Nalini Nadkarni Keri Healy, Erik Ordway, Lois Delcambre, and Dave Maier – Historically, ecologists have collected and stored data in individualist ways, making data sharing among collaborators and subsequent data mining difficult.

James W. Brunt, Peter McCartney, Karen Baker, and Susan G. Stafford – Emerging information technologies allow new exploration into tools for the management and use of information that solve problems for ecologists and create new and innovative lines of scientific inquiry. Collaborative, multi-disciplinary research programs to facilitate these new lines of inquiry have produced a need for scientific information systems that communicate data, information, and knowledge across spatial, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries.