Volumes of long-term environmental data are essential for natural resource management ecosystem protection. Storing, accessing and incorporating environmental data into models is challenging due to the diversity of datasets, which include measurement of properties associated with bedrock, groundwater, soils, vegetation and atmospheric compartments of environmental systems.

Now, such data can be easily accessed with the recent launch of a digital archive built by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing and digital librarians at the University of California’s (Santa Barbara) National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.

The Environmental System Science — Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem (ESS-DIVE) system serves as a repository for hundreds of DOE-funded research projects under the agency’s Environmental System Science umbrella, such as the Subsurface Biogeochemical Research and Terrestrial Ecosystem Sciences programs. The digital library also serves datasets that were previously stored in DOE’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center archive.

ESS-DIVE includes functionalities that allow researchers to upload their data and keep it proprietary as they work on the paper. Once the paper is published, researchers can go into the library and easily make their data public. Other tools allow users to access, contribute and publish data and track data downloads. Each data package is assigned a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) when uploaded, enabling researchers to cite the dataset they used.