Achieving FAIR Data Principles at the Environmental Data Initiative, the US-LTER Data Repository

The Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) is a continuation and expansion of the original United Stated Long-Term Ecological Research Program (US-LTER) data repository which went into production in 2013. Building on decades of data management experience in LTER, EDI is addressing the challenge of publishing a diverse corpus of research data (Servilla et al. 2016). EDI’s accomplishments span all aspects of the data curation and publication lifecycle, including repository cyberinfrastructure, outreach and training, and enhancements to data documentation methodologies used by the environmental and ecological research communities. EDI is managing almost 43,000 unique data packages and their revisions from a community of nearly 2,300 individual data authors, most of which are contributed by LTER sites, and are openly accessible and documented with rich science metadata in the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) standard. Here we will present how EDI achieves FAIR data principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016, Stall et al. 2017), and report data use metrics as a measure of success. The FAIR principles serve as benchmarks for EDI’s operation and management: the data we curate are Findable