This would aid data access by eventual award holders and could also reduce data costs by bulk purchase. It is recommended that such a group be established for GANE at the earliest opportunity. Once proposals are selected, this group would contact consortia to establish data needs, co-ordinate data acquisition, and establish guidelines for holding the generated data. It is now required that all NERC research programmes co-ordinate arrangements for providing, managing and disseminating data. As a first step within GANE, this short report provides a survey of data sources that could be useful for project proposers.
Data management is currently a rapidly evolving area.
As a first data consideration for GANE, this report builds on the experience of these other more extensive studies. The tables on the linked pages provide information on the existence of different datasets relevant to GANE, considering aspects of the nitrogen cycle as well as more general environmental parameters. It is clear that a survey of data sources such as this would never be complete. This particularly applies to the case study datasets reported by individual scientists, which represent examples of the many thousands of potentially useful datasets. It is, nevertheless, hoped that the short survey here stimulates proposers in GANE to exploit available datasets to the full, including those listed here and others found by pursuing leads to identify additional data sources.