About the Project

The rapid growth of open data products can advance research and can cross-disciplinary and geographical boundaries. Unfortunately data discovery can hinder the use of open datasets in ecological research. Researchers waste valuable time trying to search for and identify suitable datasets to pull into their analyses. Online repositories are a huge advancement for open science but the dispersion of data used in ecological research, which ranges from oceanographic to species data, can be overwhelming

By pulling the ecological community together to identify high quality, comprehensive, and clean datasets we can save time and get down to research faster. I am making a catalogue of ecological datasets that are commonly wanted by ecologists to pull into large data syntheses or smaller scale experimental studies. These data are typically global in scope, clean, and relatively complete temporally and spatially. The goal is to have a ‘highlight’ list of datasets that ecologists can reference quickly.

Another goal of this project is to make it open source such that anyone can contribute to the addition and maintenance of the data catalogue. As better datasets become available, if links break, if new tools exist to work with datasets, the ecology community can add changes to the catalogue.

This project is supported by the RDA/US Data Share grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation #G-2014-13746.