A Bigger Picture: Data Standards, Interoperability and Data Sharing

Abstract

Data sharing is of growing interest in science and in ecology. Many research questions in ecology, particularly those addressing global change, require large, long-term data sets that cannot be collected by any one research group alone. Moreover, an increasing number of funding providers and publishers require that researchers make their data available in some form to other researchers or to the public. Benefits to sharing your data can include new collaborations and publications, increased citations of your research, expansion of successful wildlife management strategies to new areas or species, and fulfillment of journal and funding requirements for data sharing and management plans. As you develop your database, it is worth considering ways to share your data, either with specific collaborators or with the public, and to at minimum make a description of your data set publicly available. And, as we have emphasised throughout this book, the data organisation and documentation required for sharing data should be a standard part of data collection regardless of the end uses of your data. The goal of this chapter is to introduce you to existing ecological data standards and a variety of ways to make your database archivable and usable for additional analyses.