National Agricultural Library: A Vision for Preservation and Accessibility of Agricultural Data.

Agro-ecosystem research is evolving rapidly and moving toward a more open, interdisciplinary, inter-connected and data-intensive science.  This field will continue to collect huge volumes of heterogeneous data across a wide range of disciplines by individuals or research teams from around the globe. Such data, produced at great effort and expense, are only as useful as researchers' ability to locate, access, integrate, and use them.

Data is the fundamental currency of modern agro-ecosystem research. Developing a comprehensive data management framework to enable the storage, exchange, integration, analysis, visualization and discovery of massive amounts of heterogeneous data is central to future agro-ecosystem research.  When data produced or published are managed with a high standard and made accessible, researchers will be able to process massive and complex data much more quickly and garner insight about the areas of their interest rapidly through software tools. Experiments will be designed with more insight which will multiple the value of past, current, and future research.

In this session, the presenter will first highlight the challenges and importance of effective agro-ecosystem data management. The presenter will then discuss a data management framework which outlines approaches, practices, and tools for managing voluminous amounts of data across disciplines and scales of space, time, and other variables.