Making leaf physiology FAIR: a new standard for leaf-level gas exchange data and metadata

Abstract:

With the advancement of ecological data archiving, there is an increased awareness of the FAIR principles, a call to improve Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of data. A particular challenge in meeting these goals is presented by long tail data; low volume, diverse data types with no widely used community standards. Leaf-level gas exchange data provide mechanistic understanding of plant and ecosystem fluxes of carbon and water. These data yield important parameterizations for terrestrial biosphere models and are necessary to understand the response of plants to global change. Collection of these data is both specialist and time consuming, and individual studies generally focus on limited species or restricted geographic regions. The high value of these data is recognized as evidenced by many publications that reuse and synthesize gas exchange data, however there are currently no published standards in use to facilitate data re-use, making enhanced use of gas exchange data by the community challenging and somewhat ad hoc.

We have developed a standard for leaf-level gas exchange data and metadata to provide guidance to data contributors on how to store data in data repositories to maximize the value of that data and facilitate efficient data re-use. For data users, the standard will expand the capacity of data repositories to optimize data search and extraction, and how ready those data are for incorporation into synthesis products. The standard encompasses metadata elements, standard vocabularies, required variables and a crosswalk across the outputs of common instruments to enable accurate data compilation. Currently the standard covers survey measurements, dark respiration, CO2 and light response curves, and parameters derived from those measurements.

The standard is being developed for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Environmental Systems Science Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem (ESS-DIVE) data repository. However, development of the standard has considered global needs for these data, and subject matter experts from institutions around the world have been invited to review and contribute to the standard. We hope that this broad community engagement will lead to wide acceptance and uptake of the published standard across the leaf-level gas exchange community.