A reporting format for field measurements of soil respiration

Ben Bond-Lamberty,Danielle S Christianson,Robert Crystal-Ornelas,Kayla Mathes,Stephanie C Pennington

doi:10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101280

Abstract

Field observations of the soil-to-atmosphere CO2 flux—soil respiration, RS—are a prime example of ‘long tail’ data that historically have had neither centralized databases nor an agreed-upon reporting format. This has hindered scientific transparency, analytical reproducibility, and syntheses with respect to this globally-important component of the carbon cycle. Here we propose a new data and metadata reporting format for RS data, based on engagement with a wide range of researchers in the earth and ecological sciences as well as expert advisory panels. Our goal was a reporting format that would be relevant and useful for synthesis activities, optimizing data discoverability and usability while not placing an undue burden on data contributors. We describe previous RS data collection efforts, lessons learned from related databases and data-oriented networks (e.g., FLUXNET) in earth and ecological sciences, and the process of community consultation. The proposed reporting format focuses on chamber-level data and metadata, specifying measurement conditions and, for a given measurement period defined by beginning and ending timestamps, a mean RS flux (or CO2 concentration) and associated ancillary measurements. With input from the research community, we have also developed research data and metadata templates to support data collection adhering to the reporting format. Fundamentally, this format aims to enable findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data, while providing ‘future-proofing’ capabilities to support reanalyses using as yet unknown algorithms or approaches. This proposed RS reporting format is openly available online and is intended to be a dynamic document, subject to further community feedback and/or change.

Highlights

Science is rapidly becoming more collaborative and data-intensive (Adams, 2012), and data-sharing and data-archival practices are changing as well
They may be characterized by a disproportionate number of negative or non-significant results, producing a ‘file drawer effect’ that skews subsequent meta-analyses (Heidorn, 2008; Rosenthal, 1979). We know that such dispersed, unarchived data will inevi tably be lost over time (Reichman et al, 2011; Vines et al, 2014). This issue is relevant for research fields related to global change, as the exact same system climatic state will never recur in the future (Wolkovich et al, 2012)
We focused on a relatively small, core set of metadata aimed at documenting soil respiration flux measurements

Summary

Introduction

Science is rapidly becoming more collaborative and data-intensive (Adams, 2012), and data-sharing and data-archival practices are changing as well. Publications with openly-available data seem to garner more citations (Dai et al, 2018; McKiernan et al, 2016) Enabling these changes is a challenge, but defining data standards and making research data available in centralized, standardized repositories and databases is relatively straightforward for centralized, coordinated efforts such as National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) (Schimel et al, 2007). Defining data standards and making these research data available in centralized repositories and databases is technically and culturally challenging This ‘long tail’ of disparate, fragmented data almost certainly encapsulates massive amounts of scientific information (Die tze, 2014), but these datasets are difficult to access or synthesize (Wallis et al, 2013). This issue is relevant for research fields related to global change, as the exact same system climatic state will never recur in the future (Wolkovich et al, 2012)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion