PROGRAM: 4-6

Title:

Abstract:

The National Institute for Environmental Studies undertakes a broad range of environmental research in an interdisciplinary and comprehensive manner. NIES is running five problem-solving research programs as well as a Disaster Environment Research Program under the Forth Medium-and-Long-Term Plan started in April 2016. Additionally, NIES is carrying out research projects that include consolidating the institute’s research foundation through basic research, data acquisition and analysis, preservation and provision of environmental samples, and other efforts. Collecting, processing, and disseminating environmental information are also our important mission and promoting open science is added to our goals in this plan’s term

There are many concerns in making environmental data to the public such as the quality assurance, lack of incentives, storage and display, privacy/ethical issues, data versioning, data granularity, negative data, etc. To remove these barriers to open data, NIES has started several approaches. Firstly, we are trying to develop institutional policies and roadmaps towards open science. Secondly, we have a plan for building an institutional repository. Thirdly, we have been giving seminars to provide NIES staffs basic knowledge required to proceed open science.

When managing research data at NIES, one of the major challenges is how to handle multiple steps of research flow. Many environmental researches consist of multiple steps such as sampling, monitoring and simulation. We must keep track of the relationship among products from these multiple steps, and we must establish the system to manage non-digital materials such as certified reference materials produced at the final step of some researches. We hope to integrate the institutional repository, the data repository (database), and the database of non-digital materials as a future data management system.

In this presentation, we will introduce the global environmental database (GED) maintained by the Center for Global Environmental Research (CGER), contributing to the global environmental research field, one of the 9 basic research fields of NIES. CGER conducts strategic environmental monitoring of greenhouse gases by using aircraft, ships, terrestrial monitoring stations, forest observation sites and other facilities in the Asia-Pacific region and Siberia. The GED serves as a fundamental database of CGER covering global environmental problems with an emphasis on global warming and climate change. GED provides collected observational and inventory data along with information on global environmental issues and the outcomes of its research to the general public in an easily understandable form, and promotes open access to scientific information. Quality controlled open data are provided in original format or NASA Ames format. The Quick Plot function allows views of the data at a glance. DOI has been minted for the datasets on demand since September, 2016. Continuously updated data at semi real time (hourly) are provided. Web APIs (application programming interface) are available to allow an access to our real-time data. GED also includes tools for processing and analyzing data such as trend analysis, trajectory and footprint calculation. As a next step, we plan to develop a research data management system to operate the data archiving, metadata management, and DOI minting. For the future, we would like to discuss about the effective division of roles between commercially available data sharing services and governmental data management platforms.