Best Practices

ScienceCache is a scientific geocaching mobile application framework that targets two user groups for citizen science data collection: youth and geocachers. By melding training and games into the hunt for place-based data collection sites and incorporating photo uploads as data and authentication, new volunteers can collaborate in robust data collection. Scientists build a project on the

The purpose of this project was to support the enhanced search, access, and visualization capability for disaster maps and other contributed products on the public USGS Hazards Data Distribution System (HDDS) (U.S. Geological Survey, 2015). These products are often provided to USGS by collaborators for sharing across the response community during the course of an emergency event response...

Science is an increasingly collaborative endeavor. In an era of Web-enabled research, new tools reduce barriers to collaboration across traditional geographic and disciplinary divides and improve the quality and efficiency of science. Collaborative online code management has moved project collaboration from a manual process of email and thumb drives into a traceable, streamlined system...

The United States has over 2 million dams on rivers and streams (Graf, 1999), and more than 84,000 of the larger dams are documented in the congressionally mandated National Inventory of Dams (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2015). The average age of these National Inventory of Dams is 52 years; by the year 2030, over 80 percent will be at least 50 years old (American Society of Civil...

Over the last few years, the ISO 19115 family of metadata standards has become the predominantly accepted worldwide standard for sharing information about the availability and usability of scientific datasets among researchers. The U.S. interests in the ISO standard have also been growing as global-scale science demands participation with the broader international community; however...

Large online data catalogs use controlled vocabularies to categorize datasets in ways that allow end users to sort and select data matching their needs. The eventual goal of this project is to build functional services so that the USGS Thesaurus and other USGS-controlled vocabularies will be available to the English-speaking scientific community, especially within the USGS where they can...

The U.S. network of 160 weather radars known as NEXRAD (NEXt generation RADar) is one of the largest and most comprehensive terrestrial sensor networks in the world. To date, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has archived about 2 petabytes data from this system. Although designed for meteorological applications, these radars readily detect the movements of birds, bats, and insects...

An additional product not originally on the funded activities list was organized for the newly-formed Science Data Coordinator Network. The Network invited 2 representatives from each of the USGS geographic areas, and several mission areas, to participate in a Data Management Workshop. The Workshop was organized by Viv Hutchison and taught by Tom Chatfield of the Bureau of Land...

The Fort Collins Science Center Web Applications Team, the Core Science Analytics and Synthesis unit of the Core Science Systems Mission Area, and a North Central Climate Science Center/NCAR/NOAA partnership group collaborated on a set of automated tools to allow remapping of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) metadata standards to International Organization for Standardization...

The Center for Biological Informatics (CBI, now reorganized into the Core Science Analytics and Synthesis unit of the Core Science Systems Mission Area) and the Fort Collins Science Center Web Applications Team joined resources to integrate their respective Metadata Tool and ScienceBase system: Incorporated the CBI-developed Metadata Tool into ScienceBase metadata workflow. This work...

The CDI Data Management Best Practices Focus Group—led by John Faundeen—determined that the best path to success in preserving and making our science accessible lies in identifying and consistently applying data management standards, tools, and methods at each stage of what the group terms the “USGS scientific data life cycle.” To assist in achieving this goal, the group developed a...

The CDI Upload, Registry and Access Project was added as a core capability to ScienceBase, a data integration system sponsored by Core Science Systems. The following description is the abstract from the 2012-3874 USGS Fact Sheet: "As a leading science and information agency and in fulfillment of its mission to provide reliable scientific information to describe and understand the Earth...