Building Toward An Integrated Data Management Network: Data Basin and ScienceBase

Data integration is an elusive concept in conservation planning and design. Data collection efforts rarely consider how other projects will find and use their data. Data formats, definitions, interfaces, and types differ from project to project. References often do not lead to the actual dataset. And, the number of datasets on any given topic grows by the day, burying researchers under pages of search results.

Landscape Conservation Cooperative Integrated Data Management Network project participants understood that these and similar issues could doom their efforts at data integration. The project  invested a significant amount of effort over the past two years developing data integration frameworks to minimize these concerns. One of the outcomes of this work is the integration of two enterprise landscape support projects: USGS ScienceBase and the Conservation Biology Institute Data Basin project. These two systems fill different niches in the data management and presentation landscape, and in a different world would never have intersected. Thanks to the IDMN project these two systems established a number of connection points that can now support a new set of data management user stories. This presentation will discuss these connections and demonstrate the use of Data Basin and Sciencebase to address a set of conservation issues.