The eAtlas is a web delivery platform for environmental research data that focuses on data management and data visualisation. As part of the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) the eAtlas was responsible for coordinating the publication of data generated by all research projects in the NESP Tropical Water Quality (TWQ) hub. The focus of the eAtlas was to:
Actively engage projects on data management issues.
Provide in-depth review of final datasets to ensure quality data publications suitable for future reuse.
Provide permanent hosting and publication of the hub datasets and metadata.
Develop and host visualisations of spatial datasets for users to quickly assess the suitability of the data for their research, and for environmental managers to view without specialist tools.
Provide a web platform for creating project centric websites that highlight stories based around research project data
The data management under the NESP TWQ hub was more successful than previous research programs that the eAtlas has been associated with over the last 12 years. A greater percentage of data products from research projects were captured and published to a high standard. As of 7 June 2021, 94 datasets were published from the NESP TWQ hub which is significantly more than the 49 datasets from the previous National Environmental Research Program Tropical Ecosystem (NERP TE) program in 2011 – 2014, and 14 datasets from the Marine and Tropical Science Research Facility (MTSRF) in 2008 - 2010.
As part of the project final reporting a comparison was made between the size of the NESP TWQ metadata records, as measured by word count of the title, abstract and lineage, to those of similar environmental datasets in other data repositories, including the AODN, CSIRO, NESP MB hub and JCU. The aim of this analysis was to determine which aspects of the data management workflow used on NESP TWQ projects contributed to the level of detail in the metadata records. The spreadsheet associated with the word count analysis is available for download. More detail on the methods are available in the NESP-TWQ 5.15 final report (awating publication on the https://nesptropical.edu.au/ website).
