Pilot Study for Database Interfaces

The Committee for a Pilot Study on Database Interfaces was organized under the auspices of the U.S. National Committee for CODATA to review and advise on data interfacing activities because of the increasing importance of conducting interdisciplinary environmental research and assessment, both nationally and internationally. The Pilot Study assessed six case studies (1) to identify and to understand the most important problems associated with collecting, integrating, and analyzing geophysical and ecological data from local to global spatial scales and over a very wide range of temporal scales, and (2) to elaborate the common barriers to interfacing data of disparate sources and types. The six cases selected for detailed investigation were the Impact Assessment for Drought Early Warning in the Sahel; the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP); the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Site; the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC); the First ISLSCP (International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project) Field Experiment (FIFE); and the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation (CalCOFI) Program.

The Committee's report, Finding the Forest in the Trees: The Challenge of Combining Diverse Environmental Data, was released in November 1994.