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Use Case DC3 - Environmental Scientist

by clagoze — last modified Nov 17, 2010 12:33 PM

  • Goal
    • Use macroinvertebrates as indicator of stream health
  • Summary

    • Leroy is a scientist with the Maryland Department of the Environment.  He monitors populations of aquatic macroinvertebrates by identifying species using simple equipment and lab notebooks.  The data he collects is used by the state to set environmental regulations, so the data must be well documented.  There is a well developed set of metadata and methodology for him to use.  He is adding to a long term data set that has been maintained by the MDE for 30 years, but has been collected by at least a dozen different people from around the state.  Leroy believes that the data he collects are public property and is glad to see his work on the MDE website.  However, he knows that the website can be difficult to find and navigate.  His research team at MDE would like to look at macroinvertebrate data from throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed rather than just within the state of Maryland, but finding this data online is difficult.  Sometimes all they get (after personal requests) are copies of spreadsheets or scanned data sheets.  Once they have aggregated the data there is no where to put it because the MDE website only handles Maryland data.  Leroy wishes it were easier to find the data he needs, for others to find his data and to deposit aggregations of data.

  • Queries
    • compare macroinvertebrate data with the USGS stream gauge data, which are not in metric units
  • Operations/Tasks
      • wants to be able to look at macroinvertebrate data from across the country, but not all data are connected to the current species names and some names of insects are also names of plants
      • explore the effect of environmental parameters on macroinvertebrate diversity indices using data collected throughout the world
  • Data sets and associated metadata

  • Metrics of completion/success
    • Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  Leroy needs to be able to tell the difference between places where a species was looked for and not seen and places where a species was not looked for.
  • Ontologies
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