Colorado mountains
From Long-Term Data to Understanding: Toward a Predictive Ecology
2015 LTER ASM Estes Park, CO - August 30 - September 2, 2015
 

GCE Data Toolbox for MATLAB: A Software Framework for Automating Environmental Data Processing, Quality Control and Documentation

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Poster Number: 
126
Presenter/Primary Author: 
Wade Sheldon
Co-Authors: 
John Chamblee
Co-Authors: 
Richard Cary

Environmental scientists are under increasing pressure to release quality-controlled data in a timely manner and to produce comprehensive metadata for submitting data to long-term archives. At the same time, the volume of digital data that researchers collect and manage is increasing rapidly due to advances in electronic data collection from instrumented platforms and sensor networks. However, few pre-built software tools are available to meet these data management needs, and tools that do exist typically focus on part of the data management lifecycle or one class of data. The GCE Data Toolbox has proven to be both a generalized and effective solution for environmental data management in the Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER). This software, developed by the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER program, integrates metadata capture, creation and management with data processing, quality control and analysis to support the entire data management lifecycle from acquisition through publishing. This poster provides an overview of the toolbox, which is a free and open source add-on library to MATLAB, a popular technical computing and analysis software package (www.mathworks.com).