The implementation of initial data populations of environmental data and creation of a primary working database

• Published in: Polar Science
• Main Authors: Fleischer, Dirk, Bölter, Manfred, Möller, Rolf
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2012
• Subjects: Polar Science
• Online Access: https://oceanrep.geomar.de/id/eprint/13779/; https://oceanrep.geomar.de/id/eprint/13779/1/2012_Fleischer_etal_Polar.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polar.2012.01.001

Biological and environmental changes are creating a growing demand for historical and global data sets. Comparing up-to-date ecological and biological findings with historical statements has become a major part of scientific work in the field of ecology. This evaluation and comparison procedure is very time-consuming while the availability of raw data is very low. Comparisons between original findings – if available – require a lot of work from print publication to digitalization or transformation to appropriate data formats. The effective use of working capacity is a general issue and has become important, should the use of information technologies be invoked to minimize time-wasting copy and paste operations. In this paper we aim to present a working repository for terrestrial biological data. The implementation of this type of data repository will provide various services to participating scientists as long as the final aim is the publication of these repositories. Furthermore, the security and long-term availability of environmental data is an issue of increasing importance to the scientific community. Unrepeatable sampling events and any data thus obtained are precious in time series analysis. For this reason, a well-structured storage of data is necessary for easy accessibility, retrieval and comparability. This is an important issue for the community of environmental scientists. The need to construct and implement repositories should prevail against all hitches and we are therefore describing our on-going task with the primary population of this kind of data repository. A biological and ecological information system is a matter of public interest and should also be a key issue for ecologists.