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
CC 5 - Data Help Desk: So Much Data, So Little Time!
	asynchronous	Erin McLean (Arctic Data Center), Amber Budden (DataONE), Margaret O'Brien (EDI), Deborah Paul (iDigBio), Erica Krimmel, Julia Masterman (CUASHI), Jack Williams (Neotoma), Marie Faust (NEON), Kelsey Yule (NEON Biorepository), Kyle Copas (GBIF)	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	12:30-1pm EDT		Q&A Session
CC 6 - Data Help Desk: Using Data
	asynchronous	Deborah Paul (iDigBio), 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.
	asynchronous	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.
	asynchronous	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.
	asynchronous	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	12:30-1pm EDT		Q&A Session
CC 7 - Data Help Desk: Sharing Data
	asynchronous	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.
	asynchronous	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.
	asynchronous	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.
	asynchronous	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.
	asynchronous	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	12:30-1pm EDT		Q&A Session

Additional Resources

• Short URL to this page: https://bit.ly/datahelpesa2020
• 2019 ESA Data Help Desk
• 2018 ESA Data Help Desk
• ESIP Data Management Training Clearinghouse
• Data Management Skillbuilding Hub
• Data Management Planning Tool - DMPTool
• iDigBio API Open Office Hours, every second and fourth Wednesday of every month at 3:30pm Eastern
• GitHub repo with specific use cases of biodiversity specimen data, documented conceptually and, where possible, linked to technical solutions
• About the Intersection across Ecology + Collections + COVID-19 (or host-pathogen relationships in general), please see:
  • The ViralMuse Task Force: In response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, natural history museum faculty and staff recognized the need to organize a task force to coalesce needed responses to the current SARS-Cov-2 virus "spillover" event. Goals of the group include producing recommendations for the COVID-19 situation that leverage the biodiversity infrastructure (e.g., specimens and informatics) of natural history museums and draw attention to the changes in standards of practice seen as critical by this group for preventing and mitigating future emerging zoonotic events. Members of this group note that much of what is needed is known. Questions center on how to ensure everyone (i.e. scientific, government, individuals) can move forward to implement recommended changes.
    • Integrating Biodiversity Infrastructure into Pathogen Discovery and Mitigation of Emerging Infectious Diseases, BioScience, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaa064 by Joseph A Cook, Satoru Arai, Blas Armién, John Bates, Carlos A Carrion Bonilla, Maria Beatriz de Souza Cortez, Jonathan L Dunnum, Adam W Ferguson, Karl M Johnson, Faisal Ali Anwarali Khan, Deborah L Paul, DeeAnn M Reeder, Marcia A Revelez, Nancy B Simmons, Barbara M Thiers, Cody W Thompson, Nathan S Upham, Maarten P M Vanhove, Paul W Webala, Marcelo Weksler, Richard Yanagihara, Pamela S Soltis on 24 June 2020
    • Soltis P, Cook J, Yanagihara R. Museums preserve clues that can help scientists predict and analyze future pandemics, The Conversation June 24, 2020
    • And note a new NSF grant (Sept 2020 to August 2022) to support further development of an "Infrastructure for Predicting, Understanding, and Mitigating Zoonotic Disease Outbreaks." Contact Pamela Soltis at University of Florida for more information. NSF Grant Number 2037937
  • The CETAF-DiSSCo COVID-19 Task Force