TALK DATA TO ME: IMPROVING DATA COMMUNICATIONS IN THE NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE

Since its founding, the National Park Service (NPS) has been tasked with the stewardship of its park units. In the last century, that responsibility has evolved to include not just tourism, but natural resource research and management too. Today the NPS acts as a network of natural laboratories in which scientists both within and outside the NPS monitor and study natural, cultural, and economic resources. Predictably, this network produces a great deal of data and information in every mode. However, data creation has greatly outpaced the network’s ability to analyze, store, and disseminate results. This has led to a backlog of unprocessed data and a wealth of knowledge that goes largely unshared.

The Geologic Resources Division (GRD) of the NPS is embracing new methods of data storage, analysis, distribution, and visualization to catch up with this overflow of data and ensure that it is more closely aligned with FAIR values. This includes new staff that can make data management a priority, and a series of relational databases that will help centralize the data communication in the division. The GRD is also making connections with data managers at other divisions and sites in order to improve communication across the network and learn to use existing but underutilized data management tools.