The primary goal of data management is to provide long term storage and maintenance of the LTER data. The design of our archival procedures, data base, and data base access system are all oriented toward achieving this goal. The second goal for data management is to provide assistance in the analysis of the data and the use of the data in modeling activities.

Over the last year a committee of scientists associated with the LTER program reviewed and amended the data management plan for the project. The committee developed a statement of the objectives for data management and policies for implementation of those objectives. The data management policies list the responsibilities of the scientists and the data management staff, and also give guidelines to ensure that data collected for the project become publicly accessible on a timely basis.

Our goal for this year was to get much of our data installed in the data base system, and to provide the project scientists with the tools and interfaces necessary to access the data. The tools for accessing the data are essentially completed, with the exception of updating of the manuals to reflect recent changes in the software. We have completed converting our system for handling bibliographic data from Fortran to C++, and have added an X­windows interface (Motif) for entering and keywording references. We have also added an interactive tool for searching the bibliographic data base. The system enables one to save results of searches as ASCII files, WordPerfect files or FrameMaker files.

Our current system enables scientists from anywhere on the internet to access our publicly available data using the LTERMENU program that we developed. We have also developed a Mosaic "page" to provide access to our data. The data and data description files can be browsed with Mosaic. The advantage of LTERMENU over Mosaic is that it enables one to plot or to extract in tabular form specific columns of data from the data files. The Mosaic interface provides easy access to the files, but does not provide a way of easily extracting data. The data files are often hard to browse with Mosaic because most of our tabular data are stored in fixed field, card image formats.

GIS support continued through collection of new data, refinement of the current spatial data and metadata, additions to the CPER map atlas, further development of a computer interface to view these data, and GIS analysis in support of current and potential research. New digital map library layers include (1) a more spatially detailed soil survey with soil properties, (2) aerial photo indices, (3) new field study sites, and (4) acquisition through a cooperative project of Digital Elevation Models (DEMS) for watersheds surrounding the CPER.

Two major refinements of existing data have been accomplished. A new format for access and retrieval of historical field study sites was developed. This new format allows scientists to more easily identify past research, based on plant or animal species key words, soils key words if appropriate, researchers names, dates of study, and, of course, geographic proximity. The second refinement to existing data is the expansion of metadata and modification to the format allowing these data to be more easily shared with other data management software.

The CPER map atlas is a collection of color maps that can be viewed on­screen or printed out on a color printer. The atlas has been expanded to include new data layers, new combinations of data as requested by researchers, and black­and­white versions of most maps.