Developing Best Practices for Sharing Long-term Marine Sediment Flux Data

Abstract:

Long-term data sets provide unique opportunities to examine temporal variability of key ecosystem processes. The need for such datasets is becoming increasingly important as we try to quantify the impact of human activities across various scales and in some cases, as we try to determine the success of management interventions. Unfortunately, long-term data sets for coastal ecosystems are rare and curating them is a real challenge. However, if we wish to make our data available for interested parties (e.g., students, managers, etc.) then we need to provide mechanisms that allow others to understand our methods, access the data, reproduce the results, and see updates as they become available. Here we use techniques, learned through the EarthCube Geosoft Geoscience Paper of the Future project, to develop best practices that will allow us to share a long-term data set of directly measured net sediment N₂ fluxes in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. By developing these data and software sharing tools we hope to help disseminate our data so that the community can better assess how this temperate estuary has changed overtime. We also hope to provide a model for others to follow so that long-term estuarine data is more easily shared and not lost overtime.