Sharing Information: Many Hands Make Light Work

Abstract

The Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program has shaped almost every aspect of my scientific career. It has enabled me to pursue ecoinformatics, a new and growing field, while allowing me to build on my training as an environmental scientist within the context of an intelligent, vibrant, and dedicated team of researchers and collaborators. Skills that I learned initially as part of workshops sponsored by the LTER program—on Geographical Information Systems (GIS), ecological information management, and wireless sensor networks—are now the skills I teach to others in a variety of formal and informal educational settings, including graduate and undergraduate classes. As a leader in sharing scientific data, the LTER program provides a strong positive and dynamic example of how data can be shared to enable new scientific syntheses. I communicate widely within the LTER network and with the larger community regarding the ethics, techniques, and values of data sharing. Collaboration, with researchers and other information managers, is a critical aspect of successfully promoting the sharing of ecological data and the important new discoveries that arise from such sharing. I started my work with the Virginia Coast Reserve (VCR) project in the LTER program at its inception in 1987. I started work at VCR site immediately after completing graduate school, as a postdoctoral fellow (1988– 1991), then subsequently as a co–principal investigator and eventually as principal investigator. Although my primary contribution to the project has been as an information manager, I also engage in a variety of landscape, environmental sensing, and population-related research. Also, I briefly served as principal investigator (1997–1998), when the former and subsequent principal investigator (Bruce Hayden) did a rotation at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Within the LTER network, I have been very active in the Information Management (IM) committee and served on the LTER Executive Committee (1997–2002) and as a cochair of the Network Information System Advisory Committee. In addition, I served as a part-time program director in Biological Databases at NSF (1993–1994). Academically, I am a research associate professor at the University of Virginia, where in addition to my research, I teach courses on GIS.