ESA 2020 Data Help Desk

About the Data Help Desk

For the third year ecological data repositories and data specialists will collaborate at the Ecological Society of America's annual meeting to add a Data Help Desk (DHD) to the virtual conference space. The Arctic Data Center, Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI), DataONE, Environmental Data Initiative (EDI), GBIF, iDigBio, NEON, and Neotoma will each engage with meeting attendees about questions, comments and concerns using DHD partner data in their own discipline and area of research. The conference is being held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic, from August 3 - 6, 2020.

DHD partners are also contributing talks to the ESA 2020 Career Central. The schedule below summarizes these career fair contributions.

Schedule of Career Central Activities

Day	Time	Speakers	Title	Description
Tuesday, 7/4	TBD	Erin McLean (Arctic Data Center)	Data Help Desk: So much data, so little time!	This session is an introduction to data repositories where you can deposit your datasets to meet funder or publisher requirements, and also retrieve public data to further your research. Representatives from seven repositories will give 3-min presentations highlighting their holdings, approach and services, followed by general Q&A and discussion initiated by the audience.
Tuesday, 7/4	TBD		Q&A Session
Wednesday, 7/5	TBD	Jeanette Clark (Arctic Data Center)	Cleaning data and creating tidy data structures to facilitate reproducible research	Join us to learn how tidy data concepts can make your analysis easier and improve reproducibility. This session describes how to deal with inconsistencies, missing values, entry errors, multiple values in single columns, and many other data issues. Demonstrations will use R and Open Refine.
Wednesday, 7/5	TBD	Erica Krimmel (iDigBio)	Reading data directly into your analysis script: Introduction to APIs	Do you write scripts to analyze your data? An Application Programming Interface (API) can provide direct access to data and metadata in online repositories, saving you time and increasing the reproducibility of your analyses. This talk will provide an introduction in R to using APIs from several repositories of ecological data.
Wednesday, 7/5	TBD	Donal O’Leary (NEON)	From our servers to your research: tutorials and resources for loading NEON data into your preferred computing environment	When it comes to analyzing 'Big Data,' using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) will improve your workflow and your efficiency, but they may change depending on your preferred programming language. In this talk, we will use APIs in R, Python, and the command line to download National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) data into any working environment.
Wednesday, 7/5	TBD	Julia Masterman (CUASHI)	Cloud-based data tools for research, collaboration, and workflow documentation in the aquatic sciences: Jupyter Hub and HydroShare	Cloud-based tools for data analysis and modeling can expedite workflow documentation, aiding in the reproducibility of your science and enabling collaboration. This demo will provide instruction on how to use Jupyter notebooks to operate on HydroShare data resources for research and collaboration in aquatic sciences.
Wednesday, 7/5	TBD		Q&A Session
Thursday, 7/6	TBD	Amber Budden (DataONE), Bill Michener (DataONE)	10 simple rules for creating a data management plan	A comprehensive plan that describes how your data will be effectively managed during the life of the project and beyond is a valuable research tool in addition to a funder requirement. Learn the critical components of effective data management plans and explore tools that can support you in writing DMPs.
Thursday, 7/6	TBD	Margaret O'Brien (EDI), Amber Budden (DataONE)	Data citation – why and how	Creating a dataset can be a fair amount of work, and you deserve credit for it. A mechanism now taking hold is data citation. This session will describe current recommendations, plus progress linking datasets to published papers and major search engines.
Thursday, 7/6	TBD	Kyle Copas (GBIF), Abby Benson (US-OBIS)	Introduction to publishing ecology data to GBIF	GBIF supports the publication of four classes of datasets: resource metadata, plus data from checklists, occurrences, and sampling events. GBIF uses widely accepted biodiversity data standards, and offers free open source software tools to publish and share biodiversity datasets through its network.
Thursday, 7/6	TBD	Jeanette Clark (Arctic Data Center)	How to create a comprehensive metadata record	Quality metadata enhances the discovery of your data and facilitates reproducible research. Learn the principles of creating a comprehensive metadata record.
Thursday, 7/6	TBD	Jack Williams (Neotoma)	Community curation: data stewards and constituent databases	The Neotoma Paleoecology Database houses data from the recent fossil record for many taxonomic groups: plus geochemistry and isotopes. To manage this high diversity of scientific disciplines, Neotoma utilizes their own data stewards, and trains others within the community. This presentation outlines their curation process and training opportunities for contributors.
Thursday, 7/6	TBD		Q&A Session

Additional Resources

• Short URL to this page: https://bit.ly/datahelpesa2020
• ESIP Data Management Training Clearinghouse
• Data Management Skillbuilding Hub
• Data Management Planning Tool - DMPTool