Building an Atlantic Offshore Research Data Catalog

As part of RWSC’s mission to facilitate coordinated research and analysis for wildlife and marine ecosystems in U.S. Atlantic waters, the RWS Data Governance Subcommittee has been working with other taxa- and habitat-focused RWSC Subcommittees to identify and recommend long-term storage options for each type of data described in RWSC’s Science Plan. In addition, entities that fund and/or require wildlife or environmental data collection and research have described a need for simple, long-term storage and access to data that they have funded, as well as easy and centralized public discovery of, and access to, these datasets and research outputs.

An Atlantic Offshore Research Data Catalog would index existing recommended data repositories for each type of wildlife/environment research data and present a single searchable list with links to individual datasets in each repository. For this concept to function, several components are needed, including standardized and searchable metadata and a known list of repositories to index.

The work to establish these components and implement the Data Catalog concept is listed here:

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