An Ecoinformatics Application for Forest Dynamics Plot Data Management and Sharing

Several forest dynamics plot research projects in the East-Asia Pacific region of the International Long-Term Ecological Research network actively collect long-term data, and some of these large plots are members of the Center for Tropical Forest Science network. The wealth of forest plot data presents challenges in information management to researchers. In order to facilitate the management of these data, a Forest Dynamics Plot Database and Application Workshop was held in Taiwan 2009. This paper describes the results of the workshop that produced and tested an integrated information management framework. The goal for the framework was to demonstrate how fully documented data archives can be effectively used for data discovery, access, retrieval, analysis, and integration. Results from our work included setting up a database based on the Center for Tropical Forest Science structure on a local relational database (MySQL) server, an authentication interface, a metadata query web page, and 3 workflows to test the framework.