BIG RIVERS LEAD TO BIGGER DATA PACKAGES: STREAMLINING DATA PUBLICATION VIA REPRODUCIBLE PROGRAMMING

The Long-term Data Management project was established by the National Park Service's Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Division to ensure that ecological data collected by its 32 networks is usable, accessible, and secure for future generations. For the Northern Colorado Plateau Network (NCPN), riparian areas are an ecosystem of concern due to the scarcity of water on the Colorado Plateau and the disproportionally high use of large rivers by flora and fauna. Standard operating procedures for NCPN's Big Rivers Protocol have undergone multiple stages of development and refinement, making the data structure more variable across parks, sites, and years. In this project, functional programming in R was used to standardize Big Rivers data into machine-readable datasets accompanied by Ecological Metadata Language for data package release on NPS's DataStore. Reproducible quality checks were coded to flag data using I&M specific acceptance ratings and qualification codes, which automated data processing and streamlined the data packaging workflow for future users. This work highlights the importance of reproducible programming in data publication processes, and advocates for its use to efficiently increase public access to long term ecological data.