Open Access Data Sharing for Borneo’s Ecological Data

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Causes of the problem

Current approaches by researchers and ecologist in Malaysia only focused to their specific research in a small scale, and there are only few efforts that been made by to collect and analysed data and then sharing or publish it. Lack of researcher’s experience and awareness with data management and inadequate training, and unavailability of resources are the challenges for ecologist or researchers to share their data. Moreover, discovering, integrating and analysing massive amount of diverse data acquire a lot of efforts and it’s a challenge to the ecologists and researchers as they cannot achieved this by individually.

Proposed Solution

This case study propose an open access data sharing system called BorEco incorporate with ecological data and mainly used plant species and soil type of Borneo forests. This system will have extensive contextual information to give user a good understand about the data. The information about the measurement , method used and the observation made by researcher or ecologists is fully explain by using term that easy to understand such as the plant species, spatial location and method used. Users can search by species of plant and the result will show the location, characteristics of plant, sampling method and who contribute the data. BorEco also provide visualization and comparison between vegetation and soil type of Borneo forests. The system enables the ecologist or researcher to learn more and observe the relationship between different types of plant and soils at the same place.

The ecological data are contribute by the researchers and ecologists. The researcher or ecologist will submit their dataset using BorEco. Before submission, they need to provide detailed of their research. The information need to fill in by the researchers are as follow:

- Project information

- Dataset description

- Spatial coverage

- Materials used

- Dataset species

- Dates of data collected

- Collection method

- Author information

After users upload the dataset, the system will check the submission and submit to QA. This step is important so that data that being upload is valid and reliable. After QA approval, then the data will be published in BorEco.

BorEco portal flow:

[pic 1]

Figure 1: BorEco Flow

Conclusion

As a conclusion, lack of open access data sharing for ecology data can be overcome with the proposed BorEco portal. The researcher and ecologist can explore further the Borneo rainforest. In the future, beside plant species and soil types, other data such as animals can be integrate with the portal thus provide wide range of ecology data for researcher and ecologists.

References

- FACTS ON BORNEO ,http://data.mongabay.com/borneo.html#solutions

- Archiving Primary Data: Solutions for Long-Term Studies, James A. Mills et al

- Ecological data sharing, William K. Michener

- Data Sharing in Ecology and Evolution: Why Not?, Cynthia S. Parr and Michael P. Cummings