Description: Permafrost regions are highly sensitive to climate change. Bringing research data and metadata from diverse sources together and visualising them within a publicly available worldwide system would have an enormous impact on data accessibility and availability and would significantly promote scientific work. The CarboPerm WebGIS, a case study focusing on the Lena River Delta in the Laptev Sea Region (Siberia), shows how a WebGIS infrastructure can support scientific work, data management, data visualisation, and data publication. CarboPerm is an interdisciplinary German project with Russian cooperation, investigating the formation, turnover and release of carbon in Siberian permafrost landscapes. There, the Lena River formed the largest delta in the Arctic and is place of long-term Russian-German scientific cooperation in permafrost research. The CarboPerm WebGIS is being set up to visualise and emphasise the spatial context of local samples, measurements, and analyses versus the thematic background information (e.g., geomorphology, pedology, geology and vegetation), using the WebGIS infrastructure “maps@awi” at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). The CarboPerm WebGIS database includes historical data from long-term Russian-German cooperation and recent field campaigns as well as environmental datasets that are freely available via the internet or research data repositories.

Description: Permafrost-Landschaften reagieren sehr sensibel auf den Klimawandel. Die Synthese von Forschungsdaten und Metadaten über diese Gebiete und deren Visualisierung in einem interoperablen, weltweit zugänglichen System ist von hohem Nutzen für Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Innerhalb des Permafrost-Forschungsprojektes CarboPerm wird für das Lena- Delta und die Laptevmeer-Region ein WebGIS-Projekt entwickelt, welches die wissenschaftliche Forschertätigkeit durch Datenmanagement, Datenvisualisierung und Datenpublikation unterstützt. CarboPerm ist ein interdisziplinäres deutsch-russisches Kooperationsprojekt, das die Bildung, den Umsatz und die Freisetzung von Kohlenstoff in sibirischen Permafrost-Landschaften untersucht. Der Fluss Lena hat das größte Delta in der Arktis ausgebildet und ist gleichzeitig ein Kerngebiet langjähriger russisch-deutscher Kooperation in der Permafrost-Forschung. Das CarboPerm WebGIS wurde ins Leben gerufen, um den räumlichen Bezug von lokalen Probennahmen, Messergebnissen und Analysen mit thematischen Hintergrundinformationen, wie z.B. Geomorphologie, Pedologie, Geologie und Vegetation zu visualisieren. Die CarboPerm-WebGIS-Datenbank entstand unter Nutzung der WebGIS-Infrastruktur „maps@awi“ am Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung (AWI). Sie beinhaltet sowohl historische Daten aus der langjährigen russisch-deutschen Kooperation als auch von aktuellen Geländekampagnen, sowie umweltrelevante räumliche Datensätze, die aus öffentlich zugänglichen Datenquellen und Daten-Repositorien stammen.

Description: Data publication is increasingly regarded as important scientific achievement and data publications are now fully citable in journal articles. This paper focuses on improving the reusability of data publications by providing comprehensive data descriptions complementary to standardized metadata. In this context, data reports proved to be a helpful tool to fill the gap between restricted ’README’ information on one hand and preparing an extended peer-reviewed data article on the other hand.

Description: During the past decade, the relevance of research data has been rising significantly and the free and open access not only to scientific results, but to research datasets has been identified as a key issue by the scientific community, funding agencies and the public. As a consequence, there is a dynamic coevolution of national and international guidelines on management of and open access to research data (e.g. Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, G8 Open Data Charter, EU Horizon 2020 Guidelines, etc.) and the development of concepts to make data persistently accessible and citable products of research. Especially in permafrost and climate research, longterm observatories and world-wide monitoring programmes are essential to understand the impact of, e.g., permafrost thaw on the Earth climate system and consequently of climate change. Many datasets are online available, via data portals or databases like, e.g. at the National Snow and Ice Datacentre, the GTN-P Database, NORPERM, Fluxnet, etc., but often without the possibility to give the data providers recognition and acknowledgement for contributing data to a global network. During the past years, the publication of research datasets with assigned digital object identifier (DOI) has emerged as best practice for citable and persistent open access research data together with the deserved recognition of the data providers. An important step for the international acceptance and recognition of DOI-referenced data publication is the‘Statement of Commitment’of the Coalition for Data Publication in the Earth and Space Sciences (COPDESS) that aims to promote joint policies and procedures for the publication and citation of data across Earth Science journals. Key commitments, signed by many publishers and data centres, are the acceptance of data citations within reference lists of research articles, the improvement of cross-references between journal articles and published datasets, and the strong recommendation to, whenever possible, store datasets in appropriate, theme-specific data repositories, in which data access and long-term preservation are guaranteed and datasets are accompanied by sufficient metadata to enable data reuse and discovery. A comprehensive data description is essential for data reuse. Data publication is mostly known as supplementary material to scientific articles. Very often, however, the data description in the journal article is not sufficient for data reuse leading to many published dataset not being used as much as they could be. To improve this, many disciplines have developed and are developing “Data Journals” that aim to publish scientific articles with the detailed description of datasets, data portals or data collections that will be published along with the datasets. There are different formats for articles in data journals, but all have in common that they lack of any scientific interpretation of the described datasets. For standalone publication of datasets where neither format is an option, accompanying data reports are a convenient and flexible tool for enhanced data description.

Description: The GeoDataNode project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Research and Education (BMBF) conducted a survey of data management practices at GFZ. The aim was to assess the state of current practices and needs, and their alignment to institutional and national guidelines for data management. The target audience included scientific and technical employees at all levels. A response rate of 24% of the target demographic was achieved. The survey revealed a general need for improvement and structuring of research data handling. This includes provision of adequate storage space, back-up schedules, and the familiarization of young researchers with good scientific practice.

Description: Information on soil surface state is valuable for many applications such as climate studies and monitoring of permafrost regions. C-band scatterometer data indicate good potential to deliver information on surface freeze/thaw. Variation in state or amount of water contained in the soil causes significant alteration of dielectric properties of the soil which is markedly observable in scatterometer backscattered signal. A threshold-analysis method is developed to derive a set of parameters to be used in evaluating the normalized backscatter measurements through decision trees and anomaly detection modules for determination of freeze/thaw conditions. The model parameters are extracted from two years (2007-2008) backscatter data from ASCAT scatterometer onboard Metop satellite collocated with ECMWF ReAnalysis (ERA-Interim) soil temperature. Backscatter measurements are flagged as indicator of frozen/unfrozen surface, and snowmelt or existing water on the surface. The output product, so-called surface state flag (SSF), compares well with two modeled soil temperature data sets as well as the air temperature measurements from synoptic meteorological stations across the northern hemisphere. The SSF time series are also validated with soil temperature data available at four in situ observation sites in Siberian and Alaska regions showing the overall accuracy of about 80% to 90%.

Description: This report describes the KTB Borehole Measurements Data of the German Continental Deep Drilling Program (Kontinentales Tiefbohrprogramm der Bundesrepublik Deutschland), operated by the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. Extensive borehole measurements were performed during the active drilling phase of the KTB pilot and main hole (1989-1994). This report provides the full description of the logging data. Please read it thoroughly to avoid inappropriate or wrong use of the data. The terms borehole measurements, downhole logging, and logging are used synonymously here. The KTB logging data files contain the final processed versions of the geoscientific borehole logging data from logs in the two KTB boreholes: Boreholes Geographic Coordinates (WGS84) KTB-Oberpfalz VB (KTB Vorbohrung/Pilot Hole or KTB-VB) 49.8153 N, 12.118 E KTB-Oberpfalz HB (KTB Hauptbohrung/Main Hole or KTB-HB) 49.8152 N, 12.1205 E

Description: The International Geo Sample Number (IGSN) is a globally unique persistent identifier (PID) for physical samples that provides discovery functionality of digital sample descriptions via the internet. In this article we describe the implementation of a registration service for IGSNs of the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam – GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. This includes the adaption of the metadata schema developed within the context of the System for Earth Sample Registration (SESAR1) to better describe the complex sample hierarchy of drilling cores, core sections and samples of scientific drilling projects. Our case study is the COSC-1 expedition2 (Collisional Orogeny in the Scandinavian Caledonides) supported by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program3 (ICDP). COSC-1 prompted for the first time in ICDP’s history to assign and register IGSNs during an on-going drilling campaign preserving the original parent-child relationship of the sample objects. IGSN-associated data and metadata are distributed and shared with the world wide community through novel web portals, one of which is currently evolving as part of ICDP’s collaborative efforts within the GFZ Potsdam and researchers from ICDP’s COSC clientele. Thus, COSC-1 can be considered as a ‘Prime-Example’ for ICDP projects to further improve the quality of scientific research output through a transparent process of producing and managing large quantities of data as they are normally acquired during a typical scientific drilling operation. The IGSN is an important new player in the general publication landscape that can be cited in scholarly literature and also cross-referenced in DOI-bearing scholarly and data publications.

Description: The concept of the International GeoSample Number (IGSN) was introduced to uniquely identify and register geo-related sample material, and make it retrievable via electronic media (e.g., SESAR

Description: Permafrost regions are highly sensitive to climate changes. To monitor key variables and to identify environmentally relevant-processes is of topmost importance in these environments. Beside data analysis and map creation capabilities, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) also comprise functionalities for mobile data acquisition in the field, data transfer, data monitoring, data description, as well as data sharing and publication of data as WebGIS Services (Web Map/Feature Services (WMS, WFS)). Due to their excellent usability GIS technology and services are very common in many scientific disciplines all over the world, and since most data formats are standardized data re-use and data interchangeability are guaranteed. We visualize field-derived and remote sensing derived research data, collected within Russian and German cooperation projects in the Lena River Delta, Laptev Sea Region (Siberia) on a Web GIS Platform. We visualize the locations of long-term discharge measurements and of soil sampling for organic Carbon and Nutrients. Geormorphological feature classes derived from satellite data and publicly available environmental data layers (e.g. vegetation, soils, and digital elevation models) display the broader regional and thematic context. AWI offers WebGIS services published under http://maps.awi.de/awimaps/. The WebGIS core components are ArcGIS for Server 10.3 and PostgreSQL databases 9.3 including Spatial Database Engine (SDE).