Open Data Fosters Exchange of Information Across Coastal Interfaces

The Science

Exploration of Coastal Hydrobiogeochemistry Across a Network of Gradients and Experiments (EXCHANGE) is a consortium of scientists interested in improving understanding of the biogeochemical exchange between water and land in coastal systems. In EXCHANGE Campaign 1 (EC1), researchers collected water, soil, and sediment samples at 52 sites in the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic regions. This work highlights version one of the key EC1 baseline datasets currently published for open access.

The Impact

Open-access and interoperable coastal biogeochemical datasets are needed to predict how coastal systems will respond to global change. Community-driven programs are one such approach to acquiring these datasets. The EXCHANGE consortium is an open-science, community-driven program spanning traditional research and physical domains to advance synthesis and modeling efforts across coastal interfaces.

Summary

Researchers can use cohesive datasets across geographically distributed sites to examine the transferability of coastal ecosystem biogeochemical processes. The EXCHANGE consortium collaborated on study design for EC1, including how data were collected, to increase the comparability of datasets across sites. The team analyzed soils, sediments, and surface waters from across the coastal terrestrial-aquatic interface for biogeochemical variables, ranging from common water quality and soil physicochemical properties to advanced molecular-level characterizations. All data underwent quality control steps to ensure data quality. The consortium also analyzed the datasets across regions to understand when, where, and why variability existed. Others can use these data for subsequent analyses and deposit their code in an open-source repository, which aids in furthering collective knowledge about coastal interfaces.

Principal Investigator

Vanessa Bailey
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
[email protected]

Program Manager

Daniel Stover
U.S. Department of Energy, Biological and Environmental Research (SC-33)
Environmental System Science
[email protected]

Funding

The EXCHANGE project is part of Coastal Observations, Mechanisms, and Predictions Across Systems and Scales—Field, Measurements, and Experiments (COMPASS-FME), a multi-institutional project supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research program, as part of the Environmental System Science program. A portion of this research was performed at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory and the MRCAT/EnviroCAT beamline at the Advanced Photon Source, both Office of Science user facilities.

References