Major Partnerships
PISCO data management efforts involve close collaborations with a number of groups that share similar goals of understanding the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem or that are developing general solutions to data management challenges in the environmental sciences.
Office of National Marine Sanctuaries (ONMS)
Since 2005, we have partnered with theOffice of National Marine Sanctuaries on their West Coast Observation Project. This project involves the PISCO physical oceanography and database teams and focuses on the processing of nearshore temperature, CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth profilers), and ocean current data from the PISCO and Sanctuary moorings along the US west coast. Participating sanctuaries include the Olympic Coast NMS, Gulf of Farrallones NMS, Cordell Bank NMS, Monterey Bay NMS, and the Channel Islands NMS. The work complements other close collaborations between PISCO and NMS. Data that are collected from the moored array are loaded into the PISCO Data Catalog, and are regularly harvested by the National Coastal Data Development Center (NCDDC). After a series of conversions, the data are published to the National Oceanographic Data Center’s (NODC) public archive.
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National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
NCEAS has been pushing the bounds in the area of ecological informatics since its inception. PISCO works closely with NCEAS developers on many technologies that are used today to manage disparate data from multiple disciplines. For instance, the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) was first written by NCEAS researchers, and PISCO participated in a community-driven effort to improve and extend the language so that it had broader applicability. Likewise, PISCO researchers have collaborated with NCEAS on a National Science Foundation grant that explored the automated creation of handheld user interfaces for field data collection. We continue to work with developers at NCEAS in order to improve the state of interdisciplinary environmental information management.
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Santa Barbara Coastal Long-Term Ecological Research (SBCLTER)
At PISCO-UC Santa Barbara, researchers and staff maintain a close working relationship with the Santa Barbara Coastal LTER. The programs share many of the same data management challenges that stem from working with interdisciplinary data. In order to take advantage of economies of scale, we partner with the LTER to deploy and maintain server systems that meet the needs of both research groups. Information managers at the LTER also work with us on building software systems that benefit the research community as a whole. We collaborate on data processing code used to quality-control PISCO, LTER, and NMS data, and to load those data into our shared data catalog.
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