Integrated Data management

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Wirth
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
• Term: from 2008 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 35758305

In biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) research, both the predictor – biodiversity – and the dependent variables – ecosystem functions and services – represent complex concepts. The data needed to establish BEF relationships are themselves highly heterogeneous and are typically generated by collaborative, interdisciplinary research consortia assembling expertise from various disciplines ranging from molecular ecology to remote sensing. The prominent challenges in providing quality data for scientists in BEF research are (1) the provision of appropriate metadata to understand the primary data (2) the agreement of scientists to adhere to the same naming conventions across their data sets, and (3) the confidence of scientists that the use of their data is transparent and fair. In the previous phase Z2 has developed a scalable web application, BEFdata, that meets all three challenges. BEFdata became fully functional and is now available as open source for other collaborative projects. At the same time, we continued to support data curation and synthesis. In the next phase, we will continue our service and will enhance the use of the data portal by teaching data management in workshops. We will place a focus on improving metadata quality and provision by providing help in data annotation and quality checking but also by improving functionalities to exchange metadata between repositories and statistical environments. We will steer and facilitate the process of assembling a controlled vocabulary for data validation and complex searches and will provide functionality for scientific workflows to generate tailor-made and quality-controlled synthesis datasets for the research unit and develop functionality to export these datasets to EML-based global data repositories.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 891: The Role of Tree and Shrub Diversity for Production, Erosion Control, Element Cycling and Species Conservation in Chinese Subtropical Forest Ecosystems
• Participating Institution: Universität Leipzig; Deutsches Zentrum für integrative Biodiversitätsforschung (iDiv); Halle-Jena-Leipzig