The National Environmental Science Program (NESP) is an initiative funded by the Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment, and Water. NESP is comprised of 4 research Hubs, each with distinct focus areas. Among these is the Resilient Landscapes Hub, made up of 14 universities and government research organisations, working together to support resilience and sustainability in Australia’s ecosystems. In doing this, the Hub generates valuable data that can be used by researchers, policymakers and the public.
The data is not always accompanied by metadata, which is a description of the data’s characteristics, including its format, contents and location. The data is not regularly tagged with persistent identifiers (PIDs): permanent references unique to the data that allows them to be easily found, retrieved and cited, regardless of where they are located. The interdisciplinary nature of the Hub means that the data produced are often diverse and segregated across various institutions, which makes it challenging to find, access and re-use. Researchers are seeking guidance on how to comply with the NESP information guidelines via their institutional repositories and data management services.
The NESP Resilient Landscapes Hub, supported by the ARDC, is working to develop best practice metadata standards for its research outputs through rich metadata descriptions and assigning persistent identifiers.
Specifically, this project will analyse research outputs by the Resilient Landscapes Hub to understand how and where project data are stored. Model guidelines for the creation of metadata will then be developed, to ensure that all data are described in a uniform way that adheres to the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). The guidelines will also outline how to assign persistent identifiers in a consistent way across the Hub.
The guidelines will then be applied and evaluated on the research outputs from projects in the Resilient Landscapes Hub. Implementing these standard guidelines will allow the data to be more easily accessed and used by researchers, policymakers and the public, and will also enable them to be integrated into ARDC Research Data Australia, a data discovery service of the ARDC.
These efforts will ensure that the data produced by the Resilient Landscapes Hub are easily discoverable and accessible, amplifying the impact of the Hub’s contributions to environmental resilience and improved outcomes for the community.
This project is part of the Domain Data Portals program.
The key outcomes of this project are:
