Context ofgeneral requirements in LTER

LTER stands here for LTER-Europe for which Johannes speaks. ILTER is the global Network of national long term ecological Observation Networks (e.g. LTER-Austria). LTER-Europe is the regional Group within ILTER organizing the different European national LTER Networks and it also represents the LTER RI (eLTER, proposal to the ESFRI Roadmap 04/2015).  eLTER represents a distributed RI composed of single Research entities but aims to provide a central Organisation and Information Management. It will be composed of a subset from all available LTER sites in Europe. Each site could also be seen as a single Research infrastructure.

1. What is the basic purpose of your RI, technically speaking?

a) Could you describe a basic use-case involving interaction with the RI?

Provide Long-Term Ecosystem Research (LTER) is an essential component of world-wide efforts to better understand ecosystems. This comprises their structure, functions, and long-term response to environmental, societal and economic drivers. LTER contributes to the knowledge base informing policy and to the development of management options in response to the Grand Challenges under Global Change.

From the beginning (around 2003) the design of LTER-Europe has focused on the integration of natural sciences and ecosystem research approaches, including the human dimension. LTER-Europe was heavily involved in conceptualizing socio-ecological research (LTSER). As well as LTER Sites, LTER-Europe features LTSER Platforms, acting as test infrastructures for a new generation of ecosystem research across European environmental and socio-economic gradients.

LTER aims at providing information on ecosystem functioning and processes as well as related Drivers and pressures for a whole ecosystem (a watershed). This Information information is very diverse in its technical formats (sensor Information, Aerial photographs, recordings, Pictures..). The purpose of the RI is to focus on harmonized data products.

A typical use case would be to use data on selected ecosystem compartements (e.g. soil) to feed models on ecosystem change (e.g. effects of climate change and disturbance on carbon pools). The RI is aimed at providing the required datasets with help of a discovery portal (standardized metadata) and harmonized data Access rules (in Progress).b) Could you describe how data is acquired, curated and made available to users?

LTER-Europe represents a distributed Network network of data acquisition and Management management with central facilities on data documentation and discovery. Data acquisition and Quality control is done by the single sites and usually stored locally. The metadata on the avialable datasets (including time-series) are provided via the DEIMS platform centrally. IN LTER-Europe are identified three different Levels of IT-capablities capabilities of the sites:
advanced (e.g. TERENO= a cluster of sites) providing metadata (CSW) and data (SOS, WFS, WMS) as services,
regular (e.g. LTER Zöbelboden) providing data in local databases with Basic metadata descriptions but lacking an online metadata catalogue and
basic lacking IT capabilities to provide Long term storage and preservation of their data (e.g. small Research Groups at universities). DEIMS provides a central repository of metadata on

a) Research sites (representing the Location on different Levels for the data acquisition)

b) data sets (including Service based data Provision)

c) persons (including institions and Networks)

and also providing a possibility to upload and share data files from basic and regular sites.

DEIMS (http://data.lter-europe.net/DEIMS) is the data discovery Portal providing full text and facetted search. Data Access is provided either by direct download from the DEIMS repository or the user is redirected to the local downlaod or Service link provided by the data Provider.

In future a design of distributed metadata and data nodes (local DEIMS instances) with a central discovery platform will be implemented (see H2020 eLTER Project).

c. Could you describe the software and computational environments involved?

Software: for data storage there exist For data storage LTER uses a wide range of Solutions in use solutions (file based: csv, netCDF, Excel; databases: Postgres, ORACLE, MySQL; GIS: spatial databases, shapefiles, grids etc.). The decision on the Software software solution is done by the local data Manager

for For metadata Provision provision and discovery platform: metadata Editor editor based on US-LTER DEIMS Extended extended by Features features on site and person description. DEIMS is based on DRUPAL 6 currently being migrated to DRUPAL 7.

d) What are the The responsibilities of the users who are involved in this the use case ?are distributed as follows:

• local data

Summary of LTER general requirements

Detailed requirements

Formalities (who & when)