The DendroEcological Network: A cyberinfrastructure for the storage, discovery and sharing of tree-ring and associated ecological data

Abstract

The DendroEcological Network (DEN; https://www.uvm.edu/femc/dendro) is an opensource repository of high quality dendrochronological and associated ecological data. Launched in 2018, the mission of the DEN is to provide a centralized, standards-driven cyberinfrastructure for data storage, exploration and sharing. Specifically, the objectives of the DEN are to, 1) act as an integrator of dendrochronological and ecological data, 2) facilitate synthetic investigation and analyses of these data, 3) uphold the scientific community’s goals of data transparency and reproducibility of results, 4) serve as a long-term data archiving platform for use by individuals, laboratories and the greater scientific, management and conservation communities and, 5) leverage and extend previous and future research. The DEN facilitates the gathering of individual studies into a larger network, expanding the scale of inquiry to address pressing ecological questions that no single study can answer alone.