Open Environmental Data Stewardship: Challenges and promises of FAIR-CARE integration for data protection and sharing - AGU Talk

On Tuesday 12/13 at 6:00 p.m. EST, a paper on how HSDS was used to facilitate development of a sensor network to collect data from the USA’s most northern town, Utqiagviik (Pt. Barrow), Alaska will be presented at the AGU Fall meeting. The data collected will be used to understand the effects of climate change on northern urban communities.

For more on the talk, visit the conference website.

In this paper we describe the data management and stewardship work we are developing for the NSF project “Understanding the Changing Natural-Built Landscape in an Arctic Community: An Integrated Sensor Network in Utqiagvik, Alaska.” In this long-term project we are investigating the impact of climate change on built infrastructures and surrounding landscapes through the collection of micrometeorological measurements in critical and structurally compromised sites. The goal is not only to share environmental data alongside rich contextual metadata with environmental scientists, but also to collaborate with local community organizations and policy-makers in the process of data analysis and interpretation. In order to support our scientific and broader impact goals, we implemented a data pipeline with open technologies (such as NetCDF4 / HDF5 and HSDS, "Highly Scalable Data Service") to provide scalability without sacrificing portability across digital infrastructures big and small. In addition to the design and implementation of open data management provisions for large-scale environmental sensor networks, we discuss the technical details of our approach to the integration of FAIR guidelines and the Climate Forecast Metadata Conventions with CARE principles for the purposes of community data sovereignty.

The HDF Group’s John Readey (@jreadey) is a co-author of the paper, so feel free to post any questions or comments you might have.