Data Management

SEGA is made possible as the result of a National Science Foundation grant. Data and information derived from government-funded research, including (but not limited to) data from research using facilities such as SEGA that are partially paid for by the National Science Foundation, must be made publicly available online with as few restrictions as possible. Metadata, or a description that documents the type of information being collected, will be publicly available online once the data are collected. Online access to data will require registration to allow us to track the use of SEGA data.

Data collected by the automated environmental monitoring devices that are part of the SEGA instrument (e.g., air temperature and precipitation) at each SEGA site as well as background survey data (e.g., soil analyses and irrigation water quality measures) for each site will be made available to the public in near real time.

Researcher-collected data (e.g., data collected by hand, added experiment-specific sensors, or genetic data) will also be posted online and made available to the general public.

Data will be posted when it is available, but no later than two years from data collection and processing.

Some data will have restricted access. The justification for such exceptions must be well documented and approved by the Principal Investigator and the SEGA Data Manager. Examples of restricted data may include the following: locations of rare or endangered species, data that are covered under prior licensing or copyright (e.g., SPOT satellite data), or data for which release is limited under confidentiality requirements specified by the Human Subjects Act. Researchers given permission to make use of restricted data may be subject to additional restrictions to protect any applicable commercial or confidentiality interests.

 For more information, please see the SEGA Data Management Plan and the SEGA
Data Policy.