Toward a Unified TreeTalker Data Curation Process

Forests

Riccardo Valentini¹  Shahla Asgharinia¹  Alexey Yaroslavtsev²  Enrico Tomelleri³  Luca Belelli Marchesini⁴ 

[1] Department for Innovations in Biological, Agri-Food and Forest Systems (DIBAF), University of Tuscia, Via San Camillo de Lellis 4, 01100 Viterbo, Italy;Department of Ecology, Russian State Agrarian University—Moscow Timiryazev Agricultural Academy, Timiryazevskaya St., 49, 127550 Moscow, Russia;Faculty of Science and Technology, Free University of Bolzano, Piazza Università 5, 39100 Bolzano, Italy;Forest Ecology Unit, Research and Innovation Centre, Fondazione Edmund Mach, Via E. Mach, 38010 San Michele all’Adige, Italy;

关键词: IoT;    forest ecology;    big data;    accessibility;   

DOI  :  10.3390/f13060855

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The Internet of Things (IoT) development is revolutionizing environmental monitoring and research in macroecology. This technology allows for the deployment of sizeable diffuse sensing networks capable of continuous monitoring. Because of this property, the data collected from IoT networks can provide a testbed for scientific hypotheses across large spatial and temporal scales. Nevertheless, data curation is a necessary step to make large and heterogeneous datasets exploitable for synthesis analyses. This process includes data retrieval, quality assurance, standardized formatting, storage, and documentation. TreeTalkers are an excellent example of IoT applied to ecology. These are smart devices for synchronously measuring trees’ physiological and environmental parameters. A set of devices can be organized in a mesh and permit data collection from a single tree to plot or transect scale. The deployment of such devices over large-scale networks needs a standardized approach for data curation. For this reason, we developed a unified processing workflow according to the user manual. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of a unified TreeTalker data curation process. The idea was formalized into an R-package, and it is freely available as open software. Secondly, we present the different functions available in “ttalkR”, and, lastly, we illustrate the application with a demonstration dataset. With such a unified processing approach, we propose a necessary data curation step to establish a new environmental cyberinfrastructure and allow for synthesis activities across environmental monitoring networks. Our data curation concept is the first step for supporting the TreeTalker data life cycle by improving accessibility and thus creating unprecedented opportunities for TreeTalker-based macroecological analyses.

【 授权许可】

Unknown