Ecological Data Should Not Be So Hard to Find and Reuse

Timothée Poisot; Anne Bruneau; Andrew Gonzalez; Dominique Gravel; Pedro Peres-Neto

doi:10.1016/j.tree.2019.04.005

Ecological Data Should Not Be So Hard to Find and Reuse

Trends Ecol Evol. 2019 Jun;34(6):494-496. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2019.04.005. Epub 2019 May 2.

Authors

Timothée Poisot¹, Anne Bruneau², Andrew Gonzalez³, Dominique Gravel⁴, Pedro Peres-Neto⁵

Affiliations

¹ Université de Montréal, Département de Sciences Biologiques, Pavillon Marie-Victorin 90, Avenue Vincent-d'IndyMontréal, (Québec) H2V 2S9, Canada. Electronic address: timothee.poisot@umontreal.ca.
² Université de Montréal, Département de Sciences Biologiques, Pavillon Marie-Victorin 90, Avenue Vincent-d'IndyMontréal, (Québec) H2V 2S9, Canada; Institut de recherche en biologie végétale, 4101 Sherbrooke Est, Montréal, (QC), H1X 2B2, Canada.
³ McGill University, Department of Biology, 1205 Docteur Penfield, Montreal, (QC), H3A 1B1, Canada.
⁴ Université de Sherbrooke, Département de Biologie, 2500 Boulevard Université, Sherbrooke, (QC), J1K 2R1, Canada.
⁵ Concordia University, Department of Biology, 7141 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, (QC), H4B 1R6, Canada.

PMID: 31056219
DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2019.04.005

Abstract

Drawing upon the data deposited in publicly shared archives has the potential to transform the way we conduct ecological research. For this transformation to happen, we argue that data need to be more interoperable and easier to discover. One way to achieve these goals is to adopt domain-specific data representations.

Keywords: data standardization; ecological synthesis; metadata; open data.

MeSH terms

Ecology*