Encouraging Collaborative Research During ABoVE Through Coordinated Data Management

Abstract:

Research for the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) is leading to a greater understanding of ecosystem vulnerability and resilience to environmental change through integrating field-based studies, data from airborne and satellite remote sensing, and modeling. ABoVE includes more than 100 projects and over 700 individual researchers (through NASA-funded, partner, and affiliated projects). This team of researchers plans and conducts fieldwork, creates data products, and archives/publishes final data products in an effort to share their research with other ABoVE scientists and the larger scientific community. Using the ABoVE Data Workflow and the ABoVE Science Cloud, researchers are able to create and share details about their research sites, as well as develop their data products for the campaign. Using the Data Workflow, researchers create and share descriptions and metadata about their products with the research community prior to archiving/publishing their completed data products. The Science Cloud provides an agile computing environment that contributes to data integration, geospatial product generation, modeling, data stewardship and long-term data preservation by aiding researchers through the entire process of the data lifecycle. Currently there are over four Petabytes of data staged on the Science Cloud (including large collections of Landsat, MODIS, DigitalGlobe, Planet, and airborne data collected as part of ABoVE). This collaborative approach to conducting a large campaign allows researchers to coordinate the collection of field data with one another, assists in planning the large-scale airborne campaign collections made as part of ABoVE, and enables data reuse by others within the campaign. There are already over 290 products planned as part of the ABoVE campaign, and 118 of those products have been archived at a NASA long-term archive facility (the Oak Ridge National Lab Distributed Active Archive Center for Biogeochemical Dynamics). Here we show the Data Workflow used by the ABoVE campaign, highlight some of the large data collections available on the Science Cloud, and showcase some of the newly available datasets and products created by ABoVE researchers.