
GRIIDC 2018 Year in Review
2018 was another eventful year for GRIIDC. The team accomplished a lot through various meetings, conferences, software releases, and training opportunities. GRIIDC continues to grow and evolve by adding new members to the team and developing new partnerships to continue our mission of ensuring a data and information legacy that promotes continual scientific discovery and public awareness of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.
By the end of 2018, GoMRI researchers identified 2,819 datasets, and 1,997 datasets encompassing all five GoMRI Research Themes that were uploaded, completed, and publicly available. GRIIDC houses over 70 TB of GoMRI data. GRIIDC expects that in 2019 the collection and use of our system continue to grow.
Here are some highlights from GRIIDC’s very busy 2018:
January: Jim Gibeaut, GRIIDC Director, and William Nichols, GIS and Metadata Specialist, participated in the 2018 Earth Science Information Partners Winter Meeting in Bethesda, Maryland from January 9-11.
February: GRIIDC participated in the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and Ecosystem Science Conference (GoMOSES) in New Orleans, Louisiana on February 5-8th. GRIIDC managed an informational booth to address data management questions, held six training workshops during the session breaks, and hosted a half day workshop attended by 76 participants. GRIIDC also held an Advisory Committee meeting at the conference. This meeting provided consortia data managers, the GoMRI management team, and research board data management committee members the opportunity to discuss data management issues and future plans and priorities for development and improvements to the GRIIDC system. During the meeting, GRIIDC provided program updates, including reports on RFP-VI data management training, data archival to national archives, data submission guidance documents for cruise and model data, and the GRIIDC program’s future.
March: GRIIDC hosted an “Introduction to the GoMRI Data Management Program” webinar on March 27.
April: GRIIDC supported a Data Carpentry workshop hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Gulf Research Program held at the Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi on April 16-17. Workshop participants learned about data organization with spreadsheets; an introduction to R; data analysis and plotting with R; and managing data with SQL.
May: GRIIDC hosted two training webinars in May: Organizing Data — Best Practices and GRIIDC Submission and How to Submit Data to GRIIDC.
June: Dr. Inia Soto Ramos, biological oceanographer, was hired as a Research Specialist and Subject Matter Expert to help curate datasets. She has an expertise in satellite remote sensing, ocean color, and optical oceanography, bringing knowledge and skills that have been invaluable to the data package review process.
July: GRIIDC staff attended the SciPy conference in Austin, Texas from July 9-15. Also GRIIDC Director Jim Gibeaut participated in the 2018 Earth Science Information Partners Summer Meeting in Tucson, Arizona from July 17-20.
August: The annual GRIIDC Advisory Committee meeting was held August 16-17 in Austin, Texas.
September: Director Jim Gibeaut and Program Manager Rosalie Rossi attended the GoMRI management team strategy meeting in Point Clear, Alabama.
October: GRIIDC released software that improved the load time of our data discovery page.
November: GRIIDC participated in the 2018 CLEAN GULF Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana from November 14-15.
December: GRIIDC actively participated in the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill (DWH) Long-Term Data Management Workshop facilitated by the University of New Hampshire Coastal Response Research Center, December 4–8, in Mobile, Alabama.
GRIIDC also presented a poster on data management training at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in Washington, D.C from December 10 -14. GRIIDC Program Manager, Rosalie Rossi, attended. The AGU fall meeting is the largest international meeting of Earth and space sciences in the world.
Finally, GRIIDC hired Dr. Udonna Ndu, environmental engineer/oceanographer to the team as a Research Specialist. GRIIDC is excited to have Dr. Ndu, who specializes in mercury biogeochemical cycling in soils, lakes and estuaries, as a subject matter expert to help analyze complex datasets in order to ensure datasets are thoroughly and accurately described.