Data Management and Access

Data Management

Within the Grassland Sciences group, we believe that good data management practices are important. Thus, since January 2010, each new group member is introduced to our data management policy and is shown how to prepare his/her data for inclusion in the group's data archive. He or she will sign a data policy agreement that governs copyright, authorship and further use of data (see documents to the right).

Data management starts with standardized variable naming and folder structures. It continues with data quality assessment and data quality control (QA/QC), which is done regularly, also using the 4-eyes-principle. And it does not end with the publication. All our data are archived, and most of our data are openly accessible and can be shared. Contact us () or check out the databases yourself!

Data Archives

Data of past projects are currently stored in the Grassland Sciences data archive as well as at international data centers where data can be accessed freely (see below). The data come with metadata that describe the "who, what, when, where, how and why" of data collection.

The first big data folder with many data files (including metadata) on the response of grasslands to summer drought has been packed by "docuteam packer" and uploaded to the ETH long-term data archive Rosetta, as the very first one at ETH Zurich in April 2016. The data had been collected by Dr. Anna K. Gilgen during her PhD project within the NCCR Climate. Data can be freely accessed using the corresponding external page link under the Creative Commons License external page CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. This great achievement, the digital curation of the group's first dataset in Rosetta, which is also searchable through the NEBIS catalog, is the result of joint efforts by the ETH Library and the Grassland Sciences group (coordinated by Dr. Sabina Keller), carried out since 2011. Many more data sets have been submitted since then. We aim for full coverage...

Open Data

The Grassland Sciences group shares data openly with numerous research groups from all over the world. The flux and meteo data of our Swiss FluxNet sites Alp Weissenstein, Chamau, Davos, Früebüel, Lägeren and Oensingen are openly available from the external page European Fluxes Database Cluster but are also part of the external page Fluxnet2015 dataset. These data from all Swiss FluxNet sites, for example, have been downloaded 1061 times in 2016, 1816 times in 2017, 1874 times in 2018, 2394 times in 2019, 3129 times in 2020, 4014 times in 2021, 5705 times in 2022, and 6645 times in 2023!! So we see steadily increasing numbers of downloads. This translates to an impressive 554 downloads per month in 2023 or a total of 26 805 downloads since the Fluxnet2015 dataset has been published. For a nice compilation, see here. Altogether, 123 site-years are now available from the Swiss FluxNet.

The external page interactive world map shows the destination of data transfers from the Grassland Sciences group between 2005 and 2017 (Green signs: downloads from the European Fluxes Database Cluster; yellow signs: direct requests).

In addition, long-term data from the Jena Experiment have been made available at external page Pangaea, again with our group´s contributions.

It is nice to see that now-a-days, reviewers also appreciate our efforts. One of the reviewers of our latest project wrote "Moreover, all the observations are open access, so other scientists are free to download and use them. This shows that she has a modern view of doing science: share knowledge and data, and cooperate in a wider perspective." Thanks for such a supportive review!