The adoption of the Ecological Metadata Language specification (EML) has been key to building network synthesis architectures which are based on high-quality standardized metadata. Several scientific groups such as the Genomics Standards Consortium, the LTER GIS community and the NEON network plan to work further with EML either to directly describe data or to augment specific data collections. Additionally, semantic approaches for data description are emerging, and EML should achieve compatibility with these.

The use of social networking media, wikis, blogs, and YouTube has skyrocketed, and more and more people are using these tools to keep in touch with family, friends, and those with common interests. While many of these media target the social sphere, they also have uses in communicating science to younger audiences and in conducting citizen science. The purpose of this workshop is to provide a space for the LTER community to share how it has used web-based and social networking media, to identify best practices, and to explore new ways of using these media at LTER sites and as a network.

Information management plays a central role in supporting the broad temporal and spatial scale synthesis projects envisioned for the LTER. It is essential that all LTER scientists, students, and staff understand that LTER research and information management go hand-in-hand, and that the principles of information management practice be learned and applied by all LTER personnel.

This workshop will introduce Virtual Field Trips version 2. We will explore developing an open access library of on-line, interactive virtual field trips for sites within the LTER Network. Individual field trips include site descriptions with links to data sources and on-line explorer tools, panoramic movies with hotspots linking to visual and audio descriptions of points of interest (teaching points), photo galleries that further describe key site features, and more.

New information managers (IMs) in the US LTER and the ILTER are often asked to perform tasks, such as developing a new site information management system, with little knowledge of the concepts from fields such as informatics, library sciences and computer science that provide a foundation for local information environments.

Quality control is a critical component of environmental data management, particularly for data collected by autonomous sensors. Performing quality analysis on high volume, real-time data from sensor networks, flux towers and instrumented platforms is a major challenge, though, and can become a limiting factor in managing these data. Software developed at the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER Site (GCE Data Toolbox for MATLAB) has proven very effective for quality control of both real-time and legacy data, as well as interactive analysis during post processing and synthesis.

DataONE (Observation Network Earth) ensures the preservation and access to earth observation data spanning broad science disciplines to enable advances in science and education. For example, data on the sources and sinks of greenhouse gases can facilitate advances in climate change science and modeling, while data on land use patterns can facilitate scientific understanding of human-environment interactions at local and regional scales.

DataONE (Observation Network Earth) ensures the preservation and access to earth observation data spanning broad science disciplines to enable advances in science and education. For example, data on the sources and sinks of greenhouse gases can facilitate advances in climate change science and modeling, while data on land use patterns can facilitate scientific understanding of human-environment interactions at local and regional scales.

This workshop has three goals:

1) Inform interested participants about a new way to organize the LTER site information.  We offer the public a view of the information that has no dead-ends, that is, all the content is related, and each website view offers related contextual content, including data, personnel, metadata, projects, and the like.

2) Receive feedback

3) Recruit adopters and developers