Using data clearinghouses to evidence global warming: The value of metadata standards

Background/Question/Methods: Data integration, synthesis and analysis for diversely distributed data collections is often a painstaking exercise, with high levels of human intervention. We show a long time series of air temperature, sea level and ice duration, from the Arctic region to the Antarctic, which depict clear trends of global warming. Presenting evidence on global warming is hardly a novelty, but the ability to generate these graphs within a few hours is new and made possible through the adoption of metadata standards.  The ecological community, with support from funding agencies and publishing journals, are slowly adopting metadata standards that preserve the data, facilitate data distribution and speed up the data integration and analysis process. The global warming results presented here were analyzed in one afternoon, extracting the data from the EcoTrends data clearinghouse sponsored by a number of agencies, including USGS, US Forest Service, the National Biological Information Infrastructure, the Ecological Society of America and the Long Term Ecological Research Network.

Results/Conclusions: We describe the global warming trends shown in the graphs. More importantly, we explain the procedure used to obtain and analyze these data. We then present similar web-based resources, such as the USGS water data, and the new cross-disciplinary initiatives based on the use of portable standardized metadata. Our concluding remarks include a framework for how to achieve high quality data documentation which explains the process and the level of involvement needed from all the community, including scientists, publishing companies and funding agencies.