Data Management
Effective management of research data is critical to the LEAF group, particularly since our group often works with and creates large, complex, and diverse research datasets. Effectively managing your data is also a good way to minimize the chances that you will lose data, increase the tracibility of how data is used in your project, and
Planning to Manage Your Data
As part of your thesis or dissertation proposal (and ideally earlier) you will need to develop a plan articulating how you will manage your research data. This data management plan (DMP) should help you develop a strategy and concrete steps to ensure that you know what kind of data you'll be working with, how you will preserve and document that data, and how you will make that data available after your project has concluded. The following questions are essential to developing an effective DMP (i.e., these are the sections your DMP should have):
- What kinds of data will you be creating and using?
- How will you document the data that you are creating and using?
- Who should have access to your data during your research project?
- How will you make your data available and usable after your project is over?
If your project is in support of a grant or contract, there may already be a DMP that was developed during the project proposal phase that you are required to follow. If you are carrying out a project while being supported on of a fellowship or departmental teaching assistant, you will need to develop a DMP independently. In either case, you should ask Lejo for an example DMP that could serve as a good starting point for your own DMP and your own data management plan will contain additional details that are specific to your own research data.
Preferred Data Storage Formats
| Data Type | Preferred Data Storage Formats (Extensions) |
|---|---|
| Point, time series data | Comma separated variable text files (.csv) |
| Geospatial feature data | GeoJSON (.json, .geojson), Keyhole Markup Language (.kml, .kmz) |
| Imagery | Tag Image File Format (TIFF; .tif, tiff), JPEG (.jpg, jpeg) |
| Geospatial Raster Imagery | GeoTIFF (.tif, .tiff) |
| Multidimensional Data | Network Common Data Format (NetCDF; .nc) |
Metadata Standards
Preferred Data Repositories
- CUAHSI HydroShare: Use for National Science Foundation supported projects and for unfunded research.
- DOE ESS-DIVE: Use for Department of Energy supported projects.
- zenodo: Use for datasets that are not appropriate for either HydroShare or ESS-DIVE (this should be rare).