AusPlots Rangelands field data collection and publication: Infrastructure for ecological monitoring

• We describe a unique end-to-end ecological field data collection, curation and publication system.
• We provide motivation for the system, a high-level design and an implementation overview.
• Challenges around mobile collection and re-use of complex ecological data are noted.
• The system offers improved ecological field data consistency and completeness.
• We demonstrate reduced curation costs and shorter data publication timelines.

The TERN AusPlots Rangelands field data collection system has been developed to facilitate simple and efficient data collection by ecologists operating in the Australian outback. The infrastructure provides tooling for ‘clean’ data collection on mobile (tablet) devices, associated data storage in a cloud-based server infrastructure, facilities for data curation and management and interfaces with the Australian Ecological Knowledge and Observation System (ÆKOS) data repository for long-term data management and semantic enrichment. In this paper, we introduce the AusPlots Rangelands field data collection solution, providing a systems-level view and motivating its development through the discussion of key functional requirements. We provide an outline of the ÆKOS data repository and demonstrate that the combined system provides a unique end-to-end data collection, curation, archiving and publishing mechanism for ecological data.