Sustaining the Earth's Watersheds-Agricultural Research Data System: Overview of development and challenges

Abstract

The USDA Agricultural Research Service has supported watershed research since the 1930s. Data from USDA Agricultural Research Service watersheds have been disseminated independently at each location, hindering multi-site analyses. A virtual team spanning diverse organizational units developed a web-based system, Sustaining the Earth's WatershedsAgricultural Research Data System (STEWARDS) that allows users to search, visualize, and download soil, water, climate, management, and economic data from Conservation Effects Assessment Project benchmark watersheds. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of STEWARDS and discuss challenges that were met to deliver STEWARDS on time, according to requirements, and within available resources. The information technology specialists had to understand that vague and changing requirements are reasonable for a system to support loosely coupled research across diverse watersheds. Researchers and data managers had to learn to communicate clearly about their data. Open communication, respect for perspectives and constraints of others, and a shared commitment to the goal provided the basis for trust. Anticipated benefits of STEWARDS include data preservation, increased data use, and facilitation of hydrological research.

A decade of conservation effects assessment research by the USDA Agricultural Research Service: Progress overview and future outlook

“…Recognizing the importance of monitoring data, USDA ARS, as a public agency, is committed to data sharing as well as technology transfer. This commitment is evident in ARS's development of the Sustaining the Earth's Watersheds: Agricultural Research Data System (STEWARDS) as a publicly available resource for watershed analysis and assessment (Steiner et al 2008;USDA ARS 2012). STEWARDS houses data being collected by 11 USDA ARS laboratories.…”

“…Watershed assessment research under CEAP has shown that stream banks and beds are frequently important sources of the sediments transported in streams (Wilson et al 2008;Simon and Klimetz 2008). Yan et al (2010) evaluated channel movement and historical sedimentation in the Iowa River's South Fork Watershed, highlighting issues of channel condition that arise from the combined impact of channel straightening and sediment accretion.…”

Sustaining the Earth's Watersheds-Agricultural Research Data System: Data development, user interaction, and operations management

“…This team is represented in the author list, and team operations necessary to achieve the objectives are described in Steiner et al (2008). Here, our objectives are to (1) describe the data within STEWARDS, (2) describe the process of accessing watershed data and (3) provide an overview of the system management.…”

“…Figure 2 shows the generic contents of the data and definition table pairs, displays how they are related to the metadata specific to temporal data methods and analytes measured, and provides an example to illustrate specific contents. Details of the definitions of field names are not provided here (see STEWARDS Web site for documentation), but enough of the field names are suggestive that the reader can gain an appreciation of the level of detail provided.The minimum structure for STEWARDS includes a date/time value, a SiteID, and a parameter description for each data measurement record (Steiner et al 2008). These three values are the keys for the database to locate information requested by an end user.…”

The evaluation of conservation practice placement in the Little River Experimental Watershed using geographic information systems

“…The STEWARDS database was a national effort across CEAP benchmark watersheds to establish a centralized database regarding soils, hydrology, climate, topography, management, and economics (Hatfield et al 2002). The STEWARDS database is dynamic, incorporating archived databases as well as new data in a uniform format (Steiner et al 2008;Sadler et al 2008). The STEWARDS database has since become the foundation of the CEAP-WAS initiative (Mausbach and Dedrich 2004).…”