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National Ecological Meta Database

Project Aim

The purpose of this project is to develop a national database for documenting ecological impacts of climate change. The database will document existing datasets that have the potential to be used for climate change impact work, particularly in the area of biodiversity, thereby:  

• Improving our knowledge of the impacts of climate change on biodiversity;  
• Providing baseline data for future monitoring programs;  
• Operating from a central location, making it easier to locate and access relevant data;  
• Sharing of knowledge between regions and institutions;  
• Improving capacity of natural resource managers to adapt to climate change through improved understanding of climate-species relationships.  

There is no charge to access this metadata and the datasets, whose descriptions are given in the database, will remain the property of the original owners/holders of the data.  

Principal Research Partners

Status

The project is currently in development phase. We are interested in hearing from people with long-term (of the order of 10 years or more) ecological data.  

Background to the Project

To improve our understanding we need to collect together and to analyse data. This project addresses this by developing a centrally located meta database that allows easy access to a wide variety of meta data from numerous sources.  

Database Content

The project will implement a web-based database of natural system meta data. For each dataset at least the following information will be recorded:  

• General information such as the dataset name, website address (if available) for the dataset and/or organisation, the organisations data release policy for research and the purpose the data was collected for.  
• Details about the responsible organisation/institution (e.g. organisations name, contact person and details).  
• Details on the spatial extent of the monitoring (including a map showing location).  
• Details on the temporal extent of monitoring including years covered, number of interruptions to monitoring, expected continuity, frequency of monitoring and number of monitoring sites.  
• Information on the type of data, such as plant, bird, insect, aquatic, mammal, pollen, other. Also recorded (where applicable) species sampled and monitoring approach.  
• Data format (electronic or paper), information on whether monitoring guidelines were used and whether data quality checks were made.  
• Information on any publications related to the data or research using the data.  

Becoming Involved / Further Details