Environment & Sustainability

The GCMD holds more than 34,000 Earth science data set and service descriptions, which cover subject areas within the Earth and environmental sciences. The project mission is to assist researchers, policy makers, and the public in the discovery of and access to data, related services, and ancillary information (which includes descriptions of instruments and platforms) relevant to global change and Earth science research. Within this mission, the directory also offers online authoring tools to providers of data and services, facilitating the capability to make their products available to the Earth science community. In addition, citation information to properly credit data set contributions is offered, along with direct links to data and services. As an integral part of the project, keyword vocabularies have been developed and are constantly being refined and expanded. These vocabularies are also used in other applications within the broader scientific community. Users may perform searches through the Directory’s website using controlled keywords, free-text searches, map/date searches or any combination of these. Users may also search or refine a search by data center, location, instrument, platform, project, or temporal/spatial resolution.

This Geo-Referenced Field Photo Library is a community- and citizen- science data portal for people to share, visualize and archive geo-referenced photos from the fields in the world. Users can upload, edit, query and download geo-referenced field photos in the library, and use the photo-based thematic geospatial datasets for the studies of land use and land cover change, the impacts of extreme weather events, and wildlife conservation, etc. Users who provide photos can decide whether individual photos are to be shared or not. A registered user can upload photos into the library and has access to more field photos in the library than a guest user.

The IRI Data Library is a powerful and freely accessible online data repository and analysis tool that allows a user to view, analyze, and download hundreds of terabytes of climate-related data through a standard web browser.

Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) is the foundation of new innovative environmental science through a distributed framework and sustainable cyberinfrastructure that meets the needs of science and society for open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered Earth observational data.

The primary way for users to find data in DataONE is through the ONEMercury web-based search interface. DataONE is developing additional search tools, which will get listed on the Investigator Toolkit page.

The information system PANGAEA is operated as an Open Access library aimed at archiving, publishing and distributing georeferenced data from earth system research. The system guarantees long-term availability of its content through a commitment of the operating institutions.

Most of the data are freely available and can be used under the terms of the license mentioned on the data set description. A few password protected data sets are under moratorium from ongoing projects. The description of each data set is always visible and includes the principle investigator (PI) who may be asked for access.

Each dataset can be identified, shared, published and cited by using a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Data are archived as supplements to publications or as citable data collections. Citations are available through the portal of the German National Library of Science and Technology (GetInfo).

e3data.org is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It presents repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions. re3data.org promotes a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data. The registry went live in autumn 2012 and is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Provides an introduction to the most commonly used resources on a particular topic. It mostly covers social sciences topics and Earth sciences but would come in handy if someone was curious about something like where to look for real estate data.

CSCAR provides free statistical consulting to all UM faculty, staff, and graduate students with the design, planning, analysis, and presentation of research studies.

CSCAR also offers workshops on statistical methods, statistical software, and qualitative data analysis. Fall, Winter and Spring workshop offerings include Statistics Review,SAS,SPSS, Stata, SEM and Analysis with R.