Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences
Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation

110 Newins-Ziegler Hall
Gainesville, FL 32611-0430

September 28th, 2017
Dear Symbiont Selection Committee,
I am writing to nominate Dr. S. K. Morgan Ernest for the General Symbiosis Award. Dr. Ernest is
an Associate Professor at the University of Florida (Dr. Ernest is also my partner). She has been
actively involved in openly sharing data in ecology, organismal traits, and life history for over adecade. She has consistently been at the cutting edge of data sharing in these disciplines.
As a graduate student and postdoc Dr. Ernest collected data on the life-history traits of over 1400
mammals species from thousands of published papers. She published the dataset in EcologicalArchives as a Data Paper (Ernest 2003; http://esapubs.org/archive/ecol/E084/093/). It was one of
the first formally published data papers in life history. This data paper has since been cited over120 times. Most of these citations are for reuse and this data has been reused in papers publishedin Science (Lukas and Clutton-Brock 2013), Nature (Jones et al. 2014), and PNAS (Sibly andBrown 2007) all of which have been cited over 100 times. A PDF of Sibly and Brown (2007) isincluded as an article representing excellent re-use of the data because the dataset is the main
data source analyzed, it shows the power of the data for evaluating general theory in life history,
and the importance of the work using the data is demonstrated by it being cited 125 times.
During this time Dr. Ernest also worked collaboratively to develop a database of body masses ofalmost 5000 species of mammals. This work was published as a data paper in EcologicalArchives (Smith et al. 2003; http://esapubs.org/archive/ecol/E084/094/) and has now been cited
326 times. It is actively reused including in papers published in Science (Clauset and Erwin
2008, and PNAS (Savage and West 2007, Barnosky 2008, Finarelli and Flynn 2009, Jablonski
and Finarelli 2009, Silvestro et al. 2015). Dr. Ernest recently returned to her efforts to develop
large compilation databases of organismal and life-history traits, leading a group that compiled
size and life-history information on 29 life-history parameters for over 20,000 species of birds,mammals, and reptiles (Myhrvold et al. 2016; http://esapubs.org/archive/ecol/E096/269/). Thisdataset was published in Ecological Archives last year and has already been cited 18 times andreused in multiple papers including a major study of extinction risk in PNAS (Ripple et al. 2017).
All of these Ecological Archives datasets underwent formal peer review for data structure andmetadata, are published under open licenses (CC-BY or CC0) and provide excellent easy to workwith data for research on traits and life history.

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In addition to these widely used data compilations, Dr. Ernest has also published the data fromthe long-term study she runs studying how plant and mammal communities change through time.
The Portal Project is one of most well known and intensive long-term studies in Ecology. It
contains monthly data for over 40 years making it one of the most granular long-term studies ofplants and animals. Dr. Ernest has been personally involved in the project for over 20 years andhas been running the study for almost 15 years. Long-term ecological data is considered to behighly valuable and is particularly difficult to collect. This recently lead dozens of ecologists toargue that long-term data should be explicitly protected from data sharing requirements (Mills etal. 2015). In contrast to this anti-data sharing perspective Dr. Ernest made it a priority to make allof the data from the site openly available after she took over. She has published multiple data
papers from the site, expanding the time-series with each new publication (Ernest et al. 2009,Ernest et al. 2016). Recently she has taken these efforts a major step forward by posting newly
collected data from the site online immediately following collection. Within 1-2 weeks ofreturning from monthly field work the data is entered and posted to her group's GitHub
repository. All the data is licensed CC0. All new data undergoes review via pull request before
being merged. All corrections to the data are publicly tracked through pull requests and commit
messages. In addition to exceptional data structure and excellent human readable metadata, thedata is also distributed in a standards based machine readable metadata package. This dataset has
been cited and reused dozens of times in research studying general patterns in the dynamics ofecological systems (e.g., Dornelas et al. 2014, Bagchi et al. 2017, Gotelli et al. 2017).
Dr. Ernest and her lab have also done exceptional work in making this long-term data widely
reusable by the largest number of researchers and students. They are finishing development of
the portalr R package which automates obtaining the most recent data and performing common(and often quite complicated) pre-processing steps that are needed for optimal use of the dataset.
In addition, Dr. Ernest lead the development of the Portal Project Teaching Database, asimplified version of the database designed for use in teaching computational and data analysis
skills. This database is currently used in a number of university courses and is the core dataset
for Data Carpentry workshops that are taught around the world. This dataset is also licensed CC0
and has been downloaded over 30,000 times in the last two and a half years. Finally, Dr. Ernest
has been a vocal proponent of the value of data sharing, with a particular focus on the importanceand feasibility of sharing long-term ecological data (Ernest 2015, Ernest 2016a, Ernest 2016b).
Finally, Dr. Ernest also lead the development of the only large compilation of data on
mammalian ecology that includes data on over 600 species at over 1000 locations around theworld (Thibault et al. 2011; http://esapubs.org/archive/ecol/E092/201/). It was published as an

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An Equal Opportunity Institution

openly licensed data paper and it has also been regularly reused (e.g., Locey and Lennon 2016 inPNAS, cited 103 times).
In summary, Dr. Ernest lead the way in data sharing in ecology and life-history before it waseven something anyone discussed. She has continued her leadership in this field by pushing theboundaries of near real-time data sharing and producing tools to maximize the re-usability of thedata she and her group produce. The data she has produced has been reused hundreds of time andregularly in highly impactful work. While I am certainly biased, I am confident in my assessmentthat her data sharing has had a major influence on science from the study of species traits, to life
history theory, to the response of natural systems to climate change. I recommend her for thisaward without reservation.
Sincerely,Dr. Ethan P. White
Associate Professor & Moore Investigator
Dept. of Wildlife Ecology & Conservation and The Informatics Institute
University of Florida

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An Equal Opportunity Institution