FluxDataONE: An Integrated Solution for the Management, Visualization, and Analysis of Flux Data for Agricultural and Ecological Studies

Determining water flux as well as emission and uptake rates of various greenhouse gases, including CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O, is one of the key research issues when performing agricultural and ecological research in relation to global change. There are four important and desired functions for the community to effectively collaborate with each other when performing studies in this area: metadata description, data interchange speciation, relational database, and online analysis. Since these four are still not fully available among the flux data networks, the design goal of FluxDataONE is to demonstrate an integrated solution for the management, visualization, and analysis of flux data when fulfilling large-scale collaborative agricultural and ecological studies. The major components of FluxDataONE are metadata description standard dedicated for flux data, flux data interchange specification, a relational database-based flux data storage solution, a versatile way to integrate analysis function modules, and finally an integrated research environment for flux data discovery, visualization, and analysis. This paper introduces the system design, the recent progress, and a research use case. FluxDataONE is promising in improving the research efficiency, enabling large-scale collaborative research, and accelerating the scientific insights for the agricultural and ecology communities.