JNACP Data Management Breakout Notes (Bob Cook and Alan Barr)
Jan 25th
In attendance: Bob Cook, Alan Barr, Steve Aulenbauch, Eric Sundquist, Alex Kozyr, Dianne Wickland, Peter Griffith, Amy Morrell, Ray Desjardins
Notes and summary items from morning sessions:
JNACP should promote the development of seamless continental-scale spatial products for, e.g.
o climate (temperature, precipitation, vapor pressure, daily gridded at 1-km),
o soil temperature, snow cover,
o soil characteristics (texture, carbon content, base cations, nutrients),
o land cover, wetlands (especially for northern peatlands), permafrost,
o land use and land use history, disturbance and disturbance history (fire -- area and severity, logging, insect impacts, land use change, agricultural expansion, human settlement, industrial infrastructure),
o fossil fuel emissions, etc.
o human dimensions data. lateral movement of Carbon--energy, import, export
o Remote sensing products could include, e.g. radiation, temperature, reflectance, albedo, vegetation, NDVI, EVI, fPAR, LAI, land cover, land use change, phenology, biomass.
o Derived by stitching together national data products
o Concerted efforts are needed to make land surface and climate data from the US, Canada, and Mexico available in a consistent grid and common projection
o NWP products may be suitable for climate,
o Data needs for different modeling and synthesis approaches are often similar –data as building blocks can be used in several different approaches
o Joint efforts can produce better data products and avoid duplication of effort.
o Start with simple inventory of existing C-cycle data products
- For each data type, identify candidate data sets from each country
- For each data set, identify key attributes, including owner, availability, temporal and spatial resolution, shortcomings
o Based on the inventory, identify concrete opportunities to create seamless continental-scale products and set priorities
o For each product, task a group of interested people to develop a plan to merge the data sets
o For the time series products, a plan and process should be developed to produce regular updates.
o Also identify critical gaps / needs that require additional, concerted effort.
o For restricted data products (forest inventory, soils), explore the possibilities for producing degraded products?
o There may be cases where unique national regulatory requirements cause challenges in data synthesis.
o The actual data syntheses could be facilitated through a series of focused Data Integration and Synthesis Workshops that would bring together multiple research investigators working in related or complementary areas.
Important inventory data from different states and provinces with different national and state standards includes, e.g.
o agriculture inventories / crops
o forest
o woody debris, litter, Dead organic matter and soil C
o age class structure
o IPCC standards for classifying / measuring (reporting principles) different classes of carbon (above-ground, below ground, etc.)
We discussed the possibility of a formal data sharing agreement between Canada, the US and Mexico. JNACP should explore the possibility and benefits of a tri-lateral data sharing agreement (or adding explicit statements about data sharing to the Canada-US and US-Mexico bilaterals). The agreement should be a statement of intent rather than a detailed data policy.
A recommendation was made to attempt to develop common data standards and formats for point data, such as e.g., the Ameriflux and Fluxnet-Canada flux-tower data sets. A list of common point data sets could be developed from the data inventory and the data managers tasked to produce common data standards and products.
Concern was expressed that there is at present no identified data system to deliver data products to the JNACP community. At some level, a Data System will be required, although its details are not clear. A distributed system may be the simplest solution, with sufficient metadata to facilitate searching for and accessing needed data products from existing data centers and archives.
We discussed how to foster a culture of open, timely sharing of data. One suggestion was to encourage data users to consult openly with data sharers and offer them opportunities to be actively involved in collaboration. Another was to give full credit / acknowledgement to data providers, and to respect the needs of graduate students.