2002 LTER Education Symposium – Henry L. Gholz

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

2002 LTER Education Symposium – Robert Bohanan

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

Organizational Informatics: Site Description Directories for Research Networks

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.

Using XML-encoded Metadata as a Basis for Advanced Information Systems for Ecological Research

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 Obs

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.

A Spatial Data Workbench for Data Mining, Analyses, and Synthesis

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.

Integrating Ecological Data: Tools and Techniques

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.