The Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC) has announced that data from the Organization of Biological Field Stations (OBFS), along with Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) data, can now be queried from the DAAC's Mercury Search System. OBFS is an association of more than 200 field stations, primarily in North America, concerned with field facilities for biological research and education. Over 120 OBFS data products can be queried from the ORNL DAAC's search system; new OBFS data sets added to the OBFS collection will be automatically added to DAAC's search system.
The ORNL DAAC took advantage of work done by its partner, the ORNL's National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) clearinghouse, which is also based on Mercury. NBII worked to make OBFS data records searchable by converting OBFS metadata (in Ecological Metadata Language) into the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) metadata standard, used by both NBII and the ORNL DAAC.
In addition to OBFS and ORNL DAAC data, a variety of data held by data centers and researchers around the world is also available through the ORNL DAAC's Mercury search interface, including data related to climate, hydrology, vegetation/land cover, land use, soil characteristics, and gas flux/emissions. Mercury also provides links to Web sites containing models for predicting biogeochemical processes. The system allows for free text, fielded attributes (such as site, investigator, parameter, and data set title), spatial, and temporal searching.
Please take a look at the ORNL DAAC's search system (http://mercury.ornl.gov/ornldaac/) to find key biogeochemical data and information throughout the world.
By Robert B. Cooke, ORNL