Spring 2024 ScienceBase Updates
Spring 2024 topics include information on Digital Object Identifiers, file upload in ScienceBase, and a featured data release on natural and man-made landscape features and information summarized to the National Hydrography Dataset Plus Version 2.1 (NHDPlusV2)
Table of Contents
- Featured Data Release
- The Multiple Facets of Digital Object Identifiers
- Did You Know? There Are Two Ways to Upload Files to Sciencebase
The USGS has been a leader in the development of hydrologic and geochemical simulation models since the 1960's. USGS models are widely used to predict responses of hydrologic systems to changing stresses, such as increases in precipitation or groundwater pumping rates, as well as to predict the fate and movement of solutes and contaminants in water. Topography, climate, land cover, and other features control the movement of water and solutes within watersheds and their export to streams. It is often difficult to develop and process this type of spatial information for modeling and other purposes because of computational and time limitations on individual projects. The data release Select Attributes for NHDPlus Version 2.1 Reach Catchments and Modified Network Routed Upstream Watersheds for the Conterminous United States (ver. 4.0, August 2023) (Wieczorek and others, 2018) helps eliminate that difficulty by providing comprehensive landscape information in an easily obtainable format.
This data release provides a series of data sets of natural and man-made landscape features and information summarized to National Hydrography Dataset Plus Version 2.1’s (NHDPlusV2) approximately 2.7 million stream segments, their associated catchments, and their upstream watersheds within the conterminous United States. These data allow researchers and managers to acquire landscape information for both catchments (for example, the nearby landscape flowing directly into streams), and full upstream watersheds of specific stream reaches anywhere within the conterminous United States without having to perform specialized geospatial processing. Digital stream networks are increasingly important for providing information on a broad spectrum of research and public interests. Water use and availability, flood warnings, wastewater infrastructure, and monitoring of ecological resources are all topics that can be informed by digital stream networks. The medium resolution of the National Hydrography Dataset Plus (NHDPlus) is a popular digital stream network for modeling and mapping efforts in the conterminous United States, where streams are represented by 2.7 million stream segments and associated drainages.
Because of its great utility in integrated water resources studies, this data release product has become the first in ScienceBase to reach over one million total file downloads, according to the ScienceBase Data Release Dashboard. Published in 2018, the data release comprises 142 individual pages (child items), each with an average of 7,441 file downloads, resulting in a cumulative total of over one million downloads across all child items. The USGS Water Mission Area (WMA) has sought to provide improved access to these data through its National Water Census mission project creating a “National Hydrologic Geospatial Fabric” (NHGF). The NHGF project established an analysis-ready cloud-optimized parquet version of these data files and an index of available variables that can now be easily accessed via both Python [3] and R [4] using widely available geospatial water resources software packages.
These data have already been used in many publications for a wide variety of purposes: to represent major anthropogenic sources of nitrogen and phosphorus (Tesoriero and others, 2024), establish predictive variables for a model on bed-material sediment particle size (Abeshu and others, 2021), and to obtain the number of major dams in a given drainage area (Graham, 2020). They are also used as model inputs in numerous USGS WMA projects such as SPARROW, Priority Ecosystems Studies, Integrated Water Prediction (IWP), Integrated Water Availability Assessments (IWAA), Data Cyber Information Delivery (DCID), the Data-Driven Drought programs, and more.
References
Wieczorek, M.E., Jackson, S.E., and Schwarz, G.E., 2018, Select Attributes for NHDPlus Version 2.1 Reach Catchments and Modified Network Routed Upstream Watersheds for the Conterminous United States (ver. 4.0, August 2023): U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/F7765D7V.
Tesoriero, A. J., Robertson, D. M., Green, C. T., Böhlke, J. K., Harvey, J. W., & Qi, S. L., 2024, Prioritizing river basins for nutrient studies: Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 196(3), 1-21, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-023-12266-7.
Abeshu, G. W., Li, H. Y., Zhu, Z., Tan, Z., & Leung, L. R., 2021, Median bed-material sediment particle size across rivers in the contiguous US.: Earth System Science Data Discussions, 2021, 1-22, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-929-2022.
Graham, J. L., Dubrovsky, N. M., Foster, G. M., King, L. R., Loftin, K. A., Rosen, B. H., & Stelzer, E. A., 2020, Cyanotoxin occurrence in large rivers of the United States: Inland Waters, 10(1), 109-117, https://doi.org/10.1080/20442041.2019.1700749.
The Multiple Facets of Digital Object Identifiers
Digital object identifiers (DOIs) have become increasingly valuable within the scientific community because they ensure research products can be reliably located and tracked. DOIs are unique, alphanumeric strings with a prefix and suffix separated by a forward slash (e.g., 10.5066/F7P55KJN). At the U.S. Geological Survey, researchers are required to obtain a DOI for published articles, data, and software. While DOIs act as persistent URLs that can be updated to point people to the current location of research products, there is so much more to a DOI than first meets the eye.
Learn More About the Product
Each research product that receives a DOI, has information (metadata) included within its DOI record. Just by knowing a DOI, users can discover details about the object. For example, DOI metadata records typically are required to include:
- the title or name,
- who created it,
- when it was published, and
- what type of resource it is (data, software, journal article, etc.).
Link Resources, People, and Organizations
DOIs can also be used to enable linkages between resources, people, and organizations across the research ecosystem. DOI metadata records have the capability to capture information about related resources, previous versions, sources of information, parts of a whole, and identifiers for people and organizations that created or contributed to the resource.
Track the Impact of Research
When researchers include DOIs in the resources that they produce (e.g. within the reference section of a publication), the research community can track these citations and determine how frequently products are being used. This also enables the discovery of new research made possible because of previously published work. The impact of USGS-authored articles can be viewed as an Altmetric score displayed in the USGS Publications Warehouse. The impact of USGS data and software products as determined by DOI citations is tracked and displayed in the USGS Asset Identifier Service and DataCite Commons.
For more information about DOIs, check out the USGS Data Management website.
Did You Know? There are 2 ways to upload files to Sciencebase
There are currently two ways to upload files in ScienceBase: the original ScienceBase edit form (“Manage Item” > “Edit Item” > “Files” tab), and the direct-to-cloud ScienceBase File Manager (which can be accessed from the “Item Actions” section). The ScienceBase development team is actively working to merge the functionality of these two methods. The end product will be a unified upload method with all backend storage on the cloud. Until then, however, it’s helpful for users to know the key differences between the existing upload methods:
- The edit form stores files on-premise and can handle file sizes up to about 2GB. Additional functionality is available for certain file types. For example, several geospatial file types can be parsed to create extensions with web services. Uploaded xml metadata records in CSDGM or ISO format can be parsed to automatically populate landing pages and display a “View” option in the user interface. Metadata records uploaded in this way can also be harvested by the USGS Science Data Catalog.
- The File Manager stores files in the ScienceBase S3 bucket and can handle much larger file sizes, up to about 30GB (dependent on a user's network speed). All files larger than 1-2GB should be uploaded using this method. It's important to note, however, that the File Manager doesn't create extensions or parse files the way the edit form does. If you're uploading a metadata record to a data release, please use the edit form to do so.
If you’re attempting to upload large files and experiencing frequent time-outs or failed uploads, you may be able to use Globus for upload and file transfer. For more information, visit: https://www.usgs.gov/sciencebase-instructions-and-documentation/file-management#globus