In the big picture\u2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n Data are central to everything we do.\u00a0 Data are what our minds use to make conscious and unconscious judgements.\u00a0 Data are what we see both anecdotally in observations and formally in numbers. Data are the official record of a study or monitoring effort.\u00a0 Data are currency to advancing ecological science and application.<\/p>\n In reality\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n Data are not cheap. Data generated from research studies and monitoring programs typically require literature reviews, plan writing, review & approval, personnel hiring & training, plot setup & demarcation, instrumentation calibration & deployment, data collection & processing, as well as project interpretation, summary & dissemination all of which include many hours, days, and weeks involving multiple people from multiple organizations.\u00a0 In most cases, large amounts of money and time produce data that, at face value, are just a set of numbers and characters that represent something.<\/p>\n Data can mean something or nothing.\u00a0 Knowledge discovery from scientific research and early warning from monitoring is often based on data.\u00a0 Such advances are only possible when metadata (data documentation) are available.\u00a0 Lacking metadata means the data simply are just numbers and characters that mean nothing.<\/p>\n Data publication is developing quickly in all industries.\u00a0 In the ecological sciences, funding agencies and publishers are beginning to require data publication in order to receive funds or publish articles.\u00a0 The data publication process requires data verification and standardization with accompanying metadata, making data accessible to other users.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n (Source: Van den Eynden et al.<\/em> 2009)<\/p>\n As a research scientist, here are my thoughts on publishing data:<\/strong><\/p>\n I believe it\u2019s my duty as a scientist to share the data I generate from research.\u00a0 If you or your organization have not considered data publication, I highly recommend learning more and contributing to our global knowledge base!\u00a0 I\u2019ve learned about it through the Forest Service Research Data Archive (http:\/\/www.fs.usda.gov\/rds\/archive\/<\/a> ), Dryad (http:\/\/datadryad.org\/<\/a> ) and other archiving sites in addition to chatting with experienced colleagues.\u00a0 Please share your comments or experiences to help us learn more on this topic!<\/p>\n Cited literature:<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>Roberts, M.W., D\u2019Amato, A.W., Kern, C.C. and Palik, B.J. 2016 Data from: Long-term impacts of variable retention harvesting on ground-layer plant communities in Pinus resinosa forests. Dryad Data Repository.<\/p>\n Van den Eynden, V., Corti, L., Woollard, M. and Bishop, L. 2009 Research Life Cycle (Data). Managing and Sharing Data: A Best Practice Guide for Researchers.<\/p>\n Dr. Christel Kern is a research forester at the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station in Rhinelander, WI USA.\u00a0 She is currently working with collaborative, interdisciplinary teams focused on management strategies for landscape restoration and global change adaptation. Outside of work, she enjoys playing inside and out with her family.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Data and publishing Data publication has been a new endeavor for me and was not addressed during my training in graduate school.\u00a0 I have my first data publication out (Roberts et al. 2016) and have more in-progress.\u00a0 Given my recent look into this, I thought it would be worth posting this topic to prompt further discussion within early career ecologist…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":591,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,14],"tags":[39,41],"class_list":["post-587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-collaboration","category-early-career","category-research","tag-data-management","tag-early-career"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/earlycareer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/earlycareer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/earlycareer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/earlycareer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/earlycareer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/earlycareer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/earlycareer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/earlycareer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/earlycareer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/earlycareer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Van](\"https:\/\/esa.org\/earlycareer-preprod\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/23\/2017\/01\/Research-Life-Cycle-LG-1.png\")
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