The ARC-LTER Information Management (IM) supports and enhances long-term research by integrating data management from the planning to the collecting and analysis stages through to the publication of datasets and papers.   Planning at the research design stage is required to ensure that any single set of measurements is easily linked to other measurements; typically, this includes working closely with collaborating projects to ensure that their research on LTER sites and experiments or with our long-term datasets is optimally integrated.  All datasets are available for downloading from online data portals as soon as data are error-checked (usually before 2 years).

Data and Metadata Generation, Quality Checking (QA/QC), and submission to an Archive (EDI or ADC)

STEPS:

1. Data collection by project technicians, graduate students, undergraduates, and REUs, or special projects; follows protocols/methods for quality assurance/control (QA/QC). (Link to the protocols). Data notebooks, backups checked at least weekly by responsible supervisor.

2. All data collection supported by the ARC LTER is checked by the terrestrial and aquatic senior RAs at the end of the experiment, the season, or the project.

3. The PIs who check the datasets are those on the ARC LTER, are ARC Affiliated Investigators, or are submitting their project data to the ARC LTER for archiving

4. Metadata and data tables are entered in the ezEML web-base editor by the appropriate RA, PI, postdoc, or student. Link to how-to submit data.

5. The terrestrial and aquatic group lead PIs check all data sets.

6. The ARC IM examines all metadata and data for proper formatting.

7. The ARC IM works with the appropriate RA, PI, postdoc, or student to correct any errors in metadata or data formatting.

8. The ARC IM submits the corrected datasets to non-migrating archival sites such as the NSF Arctic Data Center and the NSF Environmental Data Initiative.

9. Once submitted, the ARC IM informs all dataset creators and authors of the dataset DOI number; creators and authors check for access to their archived dataset.

For questions please contact: Arctic LTER IM arc.im.lter@gmail.com, griff@ldeo.columbia.edu, or gwk@umich.edu. 

Availability of Data

All datasets of the ARC-LTER are available from the EDI data portal.  Our website data catalog provides a simple search of just the ARC-LTER datasets on EDI.  Because EDI is a member node of DataONE our datasets are also available through DataONE’s search page.   Data access and use policy is under the license: CC BY 4.0 Attribution. There we ask that datasets are properly cited and that NSF and the ARC-LTER are acknowledged in published papers and other data-related products.  Collaborating projects can and often do contribute their datasets to our online database, where we highlight them on our webpage, and if required these datasets can be replicated to the NSF Arctic Data Center.