Challenges to Sharing Data Among Environmental Scientists and Data Managers in the Southeastern United States

Poster Submission

The Increasing Biological Information Sources: Technical Assistance and Support for Delivery and Technology Transfer (IBIS) project was funded by the United States Geological Survey’s National Biological Infrastructure (NBII) to identify relevant data sets in areas of research that served NBII’s stakeholders: environmental decision makers, researchers and scientists including citizen scientists, and teachers and students. The IBIS project also developed biodiversity information tools and services to address the accessibility of USGS provided biodiversity information.

For this report, forty data sets were identified and analyzed by the IBIS researchers; the results of the data set interviews are presented in this report. A data set refers to a specific type or group of related data collected by a researcher. The researchers identified four core issues that resonated in each of the data sets; 1) the availability of the data set, 2) how the data set was stored and formatted, 3) how the data set was organized (i.e., whether a metadata standard was adopted and used), and 4) the restrictions or conditions imposed on the data set before the data set could be shared. In this report, the data sets are discussed in terms of the four core issues and their relationship to their representative sectors and agencies (e.g., academic, nonprofit, and government).