From the Field to the Cloud: A Review of Three Approaches to Sharing Historical Data From Field Stations Using Principles From Data Science

Abstract

Historical data play an important role in our understanding of environmental change and ecosystem dynamics. By lengthening the temporal scale of scientific inquiry, historical data reveal insights into the dynamic nature of ecosystems. However, most historical data has yet to make a full contribution, remaining "dark" and out of reach to the broader scientific community. This article responds to several calls stressing the importance of empirical historical materials and urges their preservation and accessibility. Despite the importance of historical data collections, few standards have emerged to integrate historical dark data into the larger digital data landscape. To encourage greater use of historical data across scientific disciplines it is vital to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (e.g., the FAIR principles). In this paper we discuss the potential of historical dark data to contribute to the modern digital ecological data landscape. We do this by focusing on three cases from the University of California field and research stations and the groups that have worked to make historical dark data discoverable. Despite the common goal of maximizing the potential use of these data collections, each case and the methods employed are unique, and showcase varying levels of success in achieving the FAIR principles and shepherding historical data into the twenty-first century.

Perspective and review: how to develop our understanding of temporal changes in the relationship between people and the landscape under societal and climate change in Northeast Asia?

“…With the text mining of historical documents and data approach, we search for records and numerical data that apply to each component layer of the landscape in old handwritten or printed documents, books, and statistics and then extract useful information by analyzing the spatio-temporal variability of the records (Burgdorf et al, 2023). Historical documents and data are part of the so-called "historical dark data" (Easterday et al, 2018;Kelly et al, 2022). In this perspective and review paper, text mining means both the visual inspection of historical documents and data, as well as computer analyses.…”

A Critical Literature Review of Historic Scientific Analog Data: Uses, Successes, and Challenges

“…Again, analog data was not the focus of these works but it was covered. Easterday et al (2018) notes the 'potential of historical dark data to contribute to the modern digital ecological data landscape'. She notes the importance of metadata and the need to promote the data and the best practices around it.…”

“…Although not much is known about how individual researchers find the analog data that they reuse, several authors note the difficulty in locating it. It languishes in labs, gets redistributed to multiple locations, or disappears (Easterday et al 2018;Duckworth, Grayce & Thornhill 2018;Curry 2011;Wicherts et al 2006;Downs & Chen 2017). Many data repositories, especially those Figure 1 Description of sources of historic data for scientific researchers who had re-used it in publications.…”

Examining Drivers of Divergence in Recorded and Perceived Human-Carnivore Conflict Hotspots by Integrating Participatory and Ecological Data

“…We obtained these verified conflict data from the main human-wildlife conflict database and georeferenced each record to the approximate village or sub-village level using landmarks and location names provided in the original dataset. While this dataset consisted of historical records of conflict which were initially collected solely for monitoring purposes (see Easterday et al, 2018), the data were cleaned and georeferenced points were iteratively verified with Kenya Wildlife Service staff prior to analysis.…”