Documentation for Information Management at

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The Jornada IM Manual

View the Project on GitHub jornada-im/documentation

Introduction

This document summarizes the accomplishments of the Jornada Basin LTER (JRN) Information Management (IM) team in 2020, and outlines activity planned for 2021. Most of the work described here has been, or will be, guided by what the IM team wrote in the Data Management Plan submitted with our 2020 LTER proposal. In the late summer of 2020 we received word that the LTER proposal was recommended for funding beginning in early 2021. The Data Managment Plan received generally favorable feedback from the NSF review panel.

Data publishing progress

There were a number of notable accomplishments in packaging and publishing JRN data products in 2020. All of these involved significant additions to, or revision of, Jornada metadata.

Please see further statistics and figures on our activity at the end of this document.

New JRN IM features, infrastructure, and data products

We added several new elements to the Jornada Basin LTER Information Management system, including a new website and an IM-focused database. We also improved several existing features of the IM system and planned for further improvements to be made in 2021. These changes have improved the accessibility and integrity of JRN datasets and lay the groundwork for increases in the efficiency of publishing JRN data and greater use of this data locally and in the wider scientific community.

JRN Websites

Metadata database

Harmonizing Jornada data

Outreach, education, and LTER Network Activity

Future initiatives

The JRN IM system has become more robust and effective over the past 12 months, approaching our goal that information management at JRN must meet or exceed all LTER Network standards and expectations. Planned activities and improvements during 2021 are below.

Challenges to overcome

Below are a few challenges the IM team faces in 2021. Any ideas on how we might overcome some of them are welcome.

Project-level metadata and spatial data issues

There are some workflows for creating, organizing, and tracking projects and their location data at the Jornada. For instance, John Anderson’s “Research notification” system tracks approved research projects and should, in theory, initiate collection of metadata for each project. However, research projects commonly suffer from a lack of metadata collection and accessibility after the approval phase, and information gathered during the approval phase is not widely accessible to Jornada researchers or the public. Some things that would help address this problem:

  1. A project metadata database (what experiments are happening or have happened, who is in charge, what are the questions, measurements, infrastructure) that is accessible to John and other project managers.
  2. A “canonical” spatial database for the Jornada that links to project IDs. This spatial database would house plot locations, sensor locations, and other coordinates telling users where experiments happened over time.
  3. A reference collection of ancillary spatial data products (roads, fence lines, vegetation, geomorphology). We have some of this, but its not very complete and there are multiple copies of everything.

Each of these resources would be most useful when shared among multiple partners at the Jornada (LTAR, LTER, etc.). The Jornada IT infrastructure and data management working group, which includes USDA, Landscape Data Commons, and LTER staff, is beginning to address some of these issues and tasks in a coordinated way.

Outreach initiatives

Infrastructure

As described in above, the JRN IM Team needs server resources to host databases, web services, a communication platform, and potentially a future version of our website. Because JRN is partnered with the USDA Jornada Experimental Range (JER) and JER has existing server resources and sysadmins, appropriating some of these JER resources for JRN use (and contributing back to supporting the system) would be the most efficient & cost-effective solution for JRN to meet its IT needs. Currently, however, this option does not appear viable because the JER server infrastructure is out of date and undergoing a long transition to a more modern, stable, and supportable system. Thus, in 2020 the IM team was unable to provision a virtual server on this system. While we await progress on JER server systems, we are investigating ways we can meet our IT needs using NMSU or cloud providers (AWS, Google services), but these will require some LTER budget. Any suggestions regarding server resources available at Jornada or partner institutions are welcomed by the IM team.

Again, the Jornada IT infrastructure and data management working group, is beginning to address some of these issues in a coordinated way.

Tables and figures

Table 1: Data packaging updates for all, and non-meteorology JRN data packages in 2020.

+————————+———+———–+ | | Total | Non-Met | +========================+=========+===========+ | New packages created | 127 | 10 | +————————+———+———–+ | Package updates | 2159 | 62 | +————————+———+———–+ | Unique package updates | 270 | 47 | +————————+———+———–+

A plot of JRN’s PASTA+ database activity (knb-lter-jrn scope), including package creation and recurring updates, at the EDI repository in 2020. Top panel: Daily actions for all packages (spikes = meteorological data package creation/updates). Bottom panel: Cumulative actions for all data packages.

JRN's PASTA+ database activity, as in Fig 1, but excluding the meteorology data packages John and Geovany update. Top panel: Daily actions Bottom panel: Cumulative actions.

Number of data packages listed under the stages of progress on our "Core", "Non-core", and "New" JRN IM Trello boards.