External Resources
General Ecological Data Repositories and Networks
- The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI) provides access to high-frequency time series aquatic data across the country.
- DataONE provides a network of data repositories for ecological researchers to share and archive data. They also provide monthly webinars as well as general information on good data practices.
- The Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) -supported data initiative created in 2016 and designed to provide a resource to share and archive datasets generated as a part of the NSF's Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB), Organization of Biological Field Stations (OBFS), and MacroSystems Biology and Early NEON Science (MSB) programs.
- The Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON) is a world-wide grassroots organization of aquatic researchers that use ecological observatory networks (EONs) to connect researchers and their datasets to facilitate data-sharing and collaborations.
- The Long Term Ecological Research program (LTER) is an NSF-supported network that maintains and provides public access to extensive long-term datasets on climate, hydrology, biogeochemistry, and vegetation dynamics of a wide variety of ecosystems. LTER has made the large datasets generated as a part of these programs available via the EDI data portal.
- The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a large, NSF-funded, ecological observatory network that is looking at ecological changes over time across the United States with a sophisticated set of advanced environmental sensors and data collection and management tools.
Biological/Biogeochemical Data
- ORNL DAAC provides satellite land data, field data, and model outputs, including climate data model outputs.
- Great Lakes Remote Sensing allows viewing of satellite-derived maps of numerous lake parameters.
Biological/ Organismal Data
- The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) provides access to worldwide biodiversity data.
- VertNET is a NSF-funded tool to access and store biodiversity data on vertebrates, integrating data from the 4 classic networks FishNet, MaNIS, HerpNET, and ORNIS, into a single data search.
Land Cover Data
- CropScape provides crop-type maps for the contiguous U.S. using satellite imagery.
- EarthExplorer is a U.S Geological Survey (USGS) -developed interface for downloading remotely sensed satellite data and aerial images.
- Global Forest Watch provides global tree cover data at 30-m resolution.
- The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (MRLC) provides land cover data from satellite imagery for the U.S.
- USGS provides composited global landsat imagery through their Web-Enabled Landsat Data (WELD).
Weather and Climate Data
- The United States EPA-CASTNET and National Atmospheric Deposition Program/National Trends Network have made weather and atmospheric data available from a multitude of stations across the country.
- NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) provides access to weather and climate data, nationally and globally.
- Past and future projections of global climate data are available through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Data Distribution Centre (IPCC DDC). These sources of data can be invaluable to researchers as they can provide important information on their research sites, and can help to answer research questions pertaining to climate change.
Local Data
- Local Weather and Climate Data
- Butler County's auditor website has available GIS data detailing local information, including roads, waterways, parcels, etc. within the county.
- Aerial photographs of Ohio are available for download via the Ohio Geographically Referenced Information Program.