Long term ecological research and information management

The United States Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program has supported research in the ecological and environmental sciences for more than three decades. The Program has grown from six to 26 sites and has been the precursor to a worldwide network of International LTER sites. Extracting knowledge from the massive volume of disparate data collected across ecosystems and decades depends upon robust and evolving information management programs at each site as well as a growing, more centralized Network Information System that facilitates inter-site and network-wide data discovery, integration, and synthesis. This paper: (a) reviews the role of policies and governance in the evolution of LTER information management; (b) identifies the components of the human infrastructure that are employed to perform site- and network-level activities; (c) discusses information management functions that are supported at LTER sites grouped by data life cycle components-data acquisition, metadata annotation, incorporation into databases, data exploration/analysis/visualization, and data curation/preservation; and (d) presents the history of the evolution of network-level services within LTER and describes the overall architecture of the Network Information System. Finally, we review the factors that have driven the evolution of information management in LTER over the past three decades and postulate the factors that will guide further evolution of LTER information management during the upcoming decade.