2021 Fellowship Program

EDI Fellows 2019
Monarchs roosting at Spirit Lake, Iowa (photo credit: Courtney, Journey North)


About

We successfully completed our fourth EDI Fellowship Program (21 June – 19 August 2021). Due to the COVID-19 health situation, we conducted the data publishing training online. Most of the Fellows engaged with the host projects remotely. We supported 16n fellows who conducted data management and publishing work for host projects located in different parts of the country and Costa Rica. For a list of host sites, on-site mentors and fellows, see below. Each fellow made a significant contribution to publishing the host site’s data, developing publishing workflows and to long-term data preservation, making the data discoverable (in the EDI data repository, DataONE and by internet searches).

Host projects and mentors for training program

  • Baylor University, Center for Aquatic Systems Research (CRASR). Location: Remote. Mentor: Stephen Powers (s_powers@baylor.edu), Fellow: Jessica Hicks

    • Project description: CRASR facilitates research on aquatic systems inclusive to biogeochemistry, ecology, and human health considerations. CRASR operates a shared water chemistry lab that applies analytical methods supported by EPA guidance (e.g., total phosphorus, major ions) to analyze many thousand samples each year. The Fellow will synthesize, disseminate and publish a variety of CRASR water data. Three existing datasets involve water quality monitoring of surface water bodies of Central Texas: Lake Waco (biogeochemistry, vertical profiles of dissolved oxygen and water temperature) and Richland-Chambers Reservoir (continuous sensor data from multi-parameter sondes). Depending on the Fellow’s interest, many other CRASR water datasets are available for archiving. In summer 2021, CRASR plans to begin disseminating data subsets using an online Rshiny data dashboard and the Fellow could be part of the development.

  • The Buzzards Bay Coalition (BBC). Location: Woods Hole, MA. Mentors: Rachel Jakuba & Alice Besterman (besterman@savebuzzardsbay.org), Fellow: Melissa Herring

    • Project description: The Buzzards Bay Coalition is a non-profit environmental advocacy organization focused on the protection, restoration and sustainable use and enjoyment of Buzzards Bay and its watershed. We pursue our mission to save Buzzards Bay through research, conservation, education, and advocacy. BBC collects thousands of environmental measurements annually, including ecological, hydrologic, and geophysical assessments. The Fellow will focus on BBC’s salt marsh program that started in 2019 (including 12 vegetation datasets, 4 fauna datasets, 9 geophysical datasets, and dozens of hydrologic datasets, in various stages of processing) and create reproducible workflows from data entry to analysis (data cleaning, develop data and database management plans). All workflows, code, and datasets produced by the Fellow will be published in EDI.

  • Organization for Tropical Studies. Location: Remote/visit Palo Verde field station (Costa Rica). Mentor: Deedra McClearn (deedramcclearn@gmail.com), Fellow: Mary (Katie) McCabe

    • Project description: The Fellow will organize, compile, and safeguard 30 years’ worth of pesticide data and effects on water quality (several chemicals) from the Palo Verde wetlands in Costa Rica. Data collection occurred at 8-10 sites during each of three study periods: 1992-1994, 2001-2005, and 2009-2011. The Fellow will work in close collaboration with the mentor team, with the possibility of follow-up work at the end of the fellowship period.

  • Pepperwood Preserve. Location: Santa Rosa, CA/remote. Mentor: Dr. Tosha Comendant (tcomendant@pepperwoodpreserve.org), Fellow: Justine Neville

    • Project description: Pepperwood is a 3,200-acre preserve located near Santa Rosa in the inner Coast Ranges of California (Sonoma County, CA). The Fellow will contribute to publishing the climate and hydrology time series data from the Preserve’s reference weather station (since 2010), as well as data collected from four weather stations installed in 2019. If time allows, there may be additional opportunity to develop data curation processes and publish data from and additional 17 soil moisture stations across the preserve. The Fellow will utilize and update EDI-based workflows created by the previous EDI fellow.

  • Quetzal Education Research Center. Location: San Gerardo de Dota, Costa Rica. Mentor: Brendan Blowers De León (bblowersdeleon@mail.snu.edu), Fellow: Amy Eppert

    • Project description: The Fellow will develop a standardized workflow for ingesting data from the previous five years of our field station’s 30+ years of cloud forest ecology research.The Fellow will create a database of research from transects through a river habitat and a primary premontane rain forest. The data will be published in the EDI data repository.

  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, The Jefferson Project at Lake George. Location: Field station at Bolton Landing, N.Y. Mentor: Larry Eichler (eichll@rpi.edu), Fellow: Maha Mapara

    • Project description: The Jefferson Project at Lake George -a collaboration between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, IBM Research, and the FUND for Lake George- is a sophisticated technological approach to studying fresh water, with a goal of understanding the impact of human activity on fresh water, and how to mitigate those effects. The fellow will publish data associated with the Jefferson Project sensor network for Lake George, NY, including lake and tributary chemistry from the Lake George watershed. The fellow also has the opportunity to contribute to the workflow and automation of the project’s increasingly diverse high-frequency data and metadata sources.

  • UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Location: La Jolla, CA. Mentor: Dr. Clarissa Anderson (clrander@ucsd.edu), Fellow: Ian Brunjes

  • UC Santa Barbara, Jenn Caselle Lab/Palmyra Atoll Research Consortium (PARC). Location: Remote. Mentors: Dr. Jennifer Caselle (caselle@ucsb.edu) and Dr. Alex Wegmann (The Nature Conservancy), Fellow: Beth Davis

    • Project description: PARC, together with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has been conducting ecological, oceanographic and behavioral research at Palmyra atoll since 2002. The Fellow will have the opportunity to contribute to curating existing data, compiling appropriate metadata, publishing in a Palmyra Research EDI data repository, while also creating a data catalog of past research at Palmyra atoll. If interested, the Fellow will contribute to developing data editing and publishing workflow protocols for future PARC and TNC data as well as assisting with a conservation impact survey from Palmyra researchers.

  • University of Colorado, Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Location: Remote. Mentors: Sarah Elmendorf (sarah.elmendorf@colorado.edu) and Chris Ray (cray@colorado.edu), Fellow: Gary Qin

    • Project description: The Fellow will have the opportunity to archive four datasets collected in the southern Rockies over the past decade. Each dataset features multiple years of semi-hourly subsurface temperatures recorded by sensors positioned in taluses and boulderfields used by the American pika. Core tasks will include trimming records to sensor in-situ dates, checking for erroneous records, applying existing R code to model minimum and maximum daily temperatures from semi-hourly data, and concatenating records into non-proprietary tabular formats to publish in the EDI repository. The Fellow will also document each step as a workflow for ongoing projects.

  • University of Florida, Dept. Environmental Engineering Sciences. Location: Remote. Mentor: Dr. Kathe Todd Brown (kathe.toddbrown@essie.ufl.edu), Fellow: Kaley Dodson

    • Project description: The Fellow will develop a workflow for the integration of EDI data with the International Soil Carbon Network (ISCN) data product, with the potential for contributing to an existing open source R-package for harmonizing the data contributions for the ISCN. There is a possibility for the Fellow to co-author a data paper describing the new ISCN data product, depending on interest and contribution level.

  • University of Montana, Flathead Lake Biological Station. Location: Flathead Lake Biological Station (Polson, MT). Mentor: Shawn Devlin (shawn.devlin@umontana.edu), Fellow: James Russell

    • Project description: Flathead Lake Biological Station researchers have designed and installed environmental sensor networks within the Flathead watershed around Flathead Lake, a long-term research site. The Fellow will clean, quality control data from the LakeNET sensor network that records meteorological variables (air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, solar radiation, precipitation, soil temperature and moisture) and water conditions (water temperature, depth, and turbidity). The data will be published in the EDI data repository.

  • University of Nevada, Aquatic Ecosystems Laboratory. Location: Field setting (Castle Lake, NV). Mentor: Sudeep Chandra (sudeep@unr.edu), Fellow: Tyler Daniel

    • Project description: The Fellow will have the opportunity to publish long-term data for Castle Lake, NV and Cliff Lake, NV (pelagic data: primary productivity, zooplankton biomass and composition; dissolved oxygen, nitrate, ammonium, nitrogen and others). Additional lake data for shorter time periods (benthic invertebrates composition and production, lake temperature and more) as well as watershed and climatological variables (run off, water quality, air temperature and more) are available for processing if time allows. The mentor team will support the Fellow with the quality control of the data.

  • University of Virginia (VA), Virginia Coast Long-Term Ecological Research (VCR/LTER). Location: Remote/visit UV Coastal Research Center (Oyster, VA). Mentor: John Porter (jhp7e@virginia.edu), Fellow: Nina Groleger

    • Project description: The Fellow will focus on two similar sensor-based datasets to create a workflow that uses quality control and quality assurance techniques and data visualization, coupled with gap-filling, to transform 31 years of raw meteorological and tide level data into high-quality, analysis-ready data. The work will draw on data from multiple sampling locations and integrate it with data from other sources (e.g., NOAA) to provide the highest-quality data products. Data and workflow will be published in EDI.

  • University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, Journey North. Location: Remote. Mentor: Nancy Sheehan (nsheehan@wisc.edu), Fellow: Luis Weber-Grullón

    • Project description: Journey North (JN) is a crowdsourced, citizen science project that encourages people from across North America in tracking wildlife migration and seasonal change. JN citizen scientists have collected event-based phenological data for 10 major migratory species, including monarchs and hummingbirds. The Fellow will contribute to publishing 25 years’ worth of observational data in the EDI data repository as well as develop a workflow that supports updating the published data with future observations. This work will include data cleaning and prep work using R or SQL. The Fellow will also be tasked with archiving datasets from closed projects. Depending on time and interest, the Fellow could also be involved in two additional initiatives: (1) database normalization to create a relational database integrating JN “sightings” database and “registration” database; and (2) integration of selected JN datasets into data visualizations using Tableau. At the close of this fellowship, the Fellow will present their work to the UW-Madison Arboretum staff and write an article for publication on the Journey North and Arboretum online news channels.

  • USDA Forest Service, Marcell Experimental Forest. Location: Marcell Experimental Forest Research Station, MN. Mentor: Nina Lany (nina.lany@usda.gov), Fellow: Mariel Jones

    • Project description: The Marcell Experimental Forest (MEF) in northern Minnesota is operated by the USDA Forest Service and was established in 1962 to study the ecology and hydrology of peatlands. The Fellow will work with meteorological data gathered by environmental sensors in the 890-hectare MEF and develop scripted workflows (R and/or Python) to (1) organize raw data & conduct quality control; (2) display data within a visually appealing online data dashboard; (3) publish data in the EDI data repository. If time allows, the Fellow could write additional scripts to convert data to a specific format maintained by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science to promote data synthesis work.

  • USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS). Location: Remote. Mentor: Paula Fornwalt (paula.fornwalt@usda.gov), Fellow: Ana Miller-ter Kuile

    • Project description: The Fellow will help make long-term climate data for one or more US Forest Service Experimental Forests and Ranges (EFRs) accessible by cleaning the data, preparing metadata and publishing the data in the EDI data repository. The main EFR is Manitou, CO with climate data collected since 1936. As time allows, the Fellow will be able to publish climate data for other EFRs, such as Crossett (Arkansas), Desert (Utah), Fort Valley (Arizona), Fraser (Colorado), Harrison (Mississippi), Hitchiti (Georgia), Santee (South Carolina), Sierra Ancha (Arizona), and Stephen F. Austin (Texas).

Published data packages

Anderson, C., M. Brzesinski, D. Caron, M. Carter, J. Jones, R. Kudela, J. Largier, K. Negrey, A. Pasulka, H. Ruhl, R. Shipe, G. Smith, J. Smith, J. Tyburczy, R. Walter, and L. Washburn. 2021. California Harmful Algal Bloom Monitoring and Alert Program Data (Darwin Core Archive format) ver 3. Environmental Data Initiative. https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/84cc4e1802ead7f88b647303ccb92529.

Craighead, A. and C. Ray. 2021. Talus Subsurface and Surface Temperature Data from Southwestern Montana, USA, 2010-2020 ver 1. Environmental Data Initiative. https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/6f19d3e6e6bc609ad1aa57b853395f30.

Groleger, N. and J. Morreale. 2021. R code for identification and correction of Photosynthetically Active Radiation sensor drift ver 1. Environmental Data Initiative. https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/a0d3d2eaba893ec837f483c4afe4d414.

Pepperwood Long-Term Soil and MET Data – Oak and Grass Stations: https://portal.edirepository.org/nis/mapbrowse?packageid=edi.943.1.

Pepperwood MET soil moisture sites 2019 – 2021: https://portal.edirepository.org/nis/mapbrowse?packageid=edi.865.1.

Sebestyen, S.D., D.T. Roman, J.M. Burdick, R.L. Kyllander, N.K. Lany, M. Jones, and R.K. Kolka. 2021. Marcell Experimental Forest 15-minute precipitation, 2010 – ongoing ver 1. Environmental Data Initiative. https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/73672ec2acdce8355bf8dbd3f4effaea.

Sebestyen, S.D., D.T. Roman, N.K. Lany, M.W. Jones, J.M. Burdick, and R.K. Kolka. 2021. Marcell Experimental Forest 30-minute resolution meteorological data, 2006 – ongoing ver 1. Environmental Data Initiative. https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/998c6c53ee2726978c2ad137f729b0c6.

Sheehan, N. and L. Weber-Grullon. 2021. Journey North – Hummingbird observations by volunteer community scientists across Central and North America (1996-2020) ver 1. Environmental Data Initiative. https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/a4bebd2b5fb5c1fd0757eac254a06357.

Sheehan, N. and L. Weber-Grullon. 2021. Journey North – Monarch Butterfly and Milkweed observations by volunteer community scientists across Central and North America (1996-2020) ver 1. Environmental Data Initiative. https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/f7d7bef57f94b33b8a18a26954252412.

Whipple, A. and C. Ray. 2021. Subsurface Temperature Data from Seven Rock Glaciers in Rocky Mountain National Park and Niwot Ridge LTER, Colorado, USA, 2018-2019 ver 1. Environmental Data Initiative. https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/929e2f61cb0926cf58ebac09d187148f.

Young, H., A. Miller-ter Kuile, B. Davis, and C. Vargas Poulsen. 2021. Palmyra Atoll Weather Tables and Monthly Rainfall 2008-2017 ver 1. Environmental Data Initiative. https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/17ff13667493dbaa5f3abaa8a22afec0.