Guidelines for Researchers
The Sevilleta LTER is dedicated to producing publicly available, high quality ecological data along with accompanying metadata that is accurate and complete.
The SEV LTER follows the LTER Network Data Access Policy and generally makes data available within two years of data collection or by the time that the main findings of the research are published, whichever comes first. Data packages are typically published in the EDI Data Repository. The SEV LTER strives to produce reproducible research and follow open science principles.
Submitting Data:
A key goal of the Information Manager (IM) is to assist researchers in publishing high quality data and metadata in public data repositories. Researchers are encouraged to contact the Information Manager well in advance of publishing a data package to the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) or other data repository.
Most SEV LTER data packages are published in the EDI data repository.
The EDI data repository is a member of the DataONE repository network. most appropriate for publishing data packages containing data that are in a tabular format. We encourage researchers to publish, at the very least, raw, quality-controlled data.
We strive to make our data open and reproducible.
Toward that end, we encourage the submission of final, analytic data along with any scripts used to produce the final data and graphics from the raw data, in addition to raw, quality-controlled data. Photos, graphs and other accompanying documents may also be submitted as part of a complete data package.
Data files and fields for submission to EDI must conform to specific guidelines.
Submitting a data package to EDI requires producing data, metadata and any additional accompanying documents in a format that can be ingested into the data repository. For any new data package, a metadata template should be completed by following the instructions within the document. As always, you are encouraged to contact the IM with any questions. When final drafts of data, metadata and any accompanying documents have been submitted to the IM, they will produce an Ecological Metadata Language (EML) file from the metadata template and publish the data package to EDI. The IM follows data package best practices established by EDI and the LTER IM community.
There may be cases where EDI is not the most appropriate repository for your data.
These are typically situations where the bulk of the data are non-tabular (e.g. – genomic data, GIS data, spatial data, modeling simulation output, etc.) Contact the IM to assist with finding an appropriate repository for such data.