Guidance Document

Drought is a major problem in the American Southwest that is expected to worsen under the effects of climate change. Currently, the Southwest Biological Science Center is monitoring the effects of drought with soil moisture probes in a range of ecosystems across an elevational gradient on the Colorado Plateau. These data are used in multiple studies to analyze the effects of drought on vegetation

A unique opportunity for USGS to collaborate with IRIS-PASSCAL (the national seismic instrument facility) has presented itself to develop a geophysical data archive format that follows FAIR principles. IRIS-PASSCAL is extending facility to include magnetotelluric (MT) instruments prescribing the need for them to archive collected MT data by extending their existing protocol. Concurrently, Congre

The cloud offers new and exciting opportunities for USGS employees to leverage computing resources and services that can quickly improve their workflows and reduce expenditures typically associated with establishing a comparable environment with physical infrastructure. However, due to the novelty of access to and use of the cloud environment, there is limited documentation and shared examples det

Increasingly, USGS scientists seek to share and collaborate while working on data and code. Furthermore, these scientists often require advanced computing resources. Jupyter Notebooks are one such tool for creating these workflows. The files are interactive, code “notebooks” which allow users to combine code and text in one document, enabling scientists to share the stories held within their data.

FAIR is an international set of principles for improving the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of research data and other digital products. The PIs for this CDI project planned and hosted a workshop of USGS data stakeholders, data professionals, and managers of USGS data systems from across the Bureau’s Mission Areas. Workshop participants shared case studies that foste

USGS will soon transition to the international metadata standards known collectively as ISO 19115. The open-ended nature of ISO benefits with much greater flexibility and vocabulary to describe research products. However, that flexibility means few constraints that can guide authors and ensure standardized, robust documentation across the bureau. This project proposed that the USGS data community

As research and management of natural resources shift from local to regional and national scales, the need for information about aquatic systems to be summarized to multiple scales is becoming more apparent. Recently, four federally funded national stream assessment efforts (USGS Aquatic GAP, USGS National Water-Quality Assessment Program, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] StreamCat, and

The purpose of the Data Management Training (DMT) Clearinghouse project was twofold. First, the project aimed to increase discoverability and accessibility of the wealth of learning resources that have been developed to inform and train scientists about data management in the Earth sciences. Secondly, the project team wanted to facilitate the use of these learning resources by providing descriptiv

The purpose of this project was to document processes for USGS scientists to organize and share data using ScienceBase, and to provide an example interactive mapping application to display those data. Data and maps from Chase and others (2016a, b) were used for the example interactive maps. Principal Investigator : Katherine J Chase, Andy Bock, Thomas R Sando Accomplishments The accomplishment

Prior to this project, data acquired from the USGS Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have been provided to requesting scientists but have not been made available to the broader USGS community, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) bureaus, or the public at large. This project performed a pilot study and developed a strategy that is scalable to evolve into a permanent UAS data management capabili

The purpose of this project was to support the enhanced search, access, and visualization capability for disaster maps and other contributed products on the public USGS Hazards Data Distribution System (HDDS) (U.S. Geological Survey, 2015). These products are often provided to USGS by collaborators for sharing across the response community during the course of an emergency event response; however,

Over the last few years, the ISO 19115 family of metadata standards has become the predominantly accepted worldwide standard for sharing information about the availability and usability of scientific datasets among researchers. The U.S. interests in the ISO standard have also been growing as global-scale science demands participation with the broader international community; however, adoption has