Ecological Data: Ecological Methods and Concepts

This book addresses these issues, providing a much needed resource for those involved in designing and implementing ecological research, as well as students who are entering the environmental sciences. Chapters focus on the design of ecological studies, data management principles, scientific databases, data quality assurance, data documentation, archiving ecological data and information and processing data into information and knowledge. The book stops short of a detailed treatment of data analysis, but does provide pointers to the relevant literature in graphics, statistics and knowledge discovery. The central thesis of the book is that high quality data management systems are critical for addressing future environmental challenges, requiring a new approach to how we conduct ecological research, one that views data as a resource and promotes stewardship, recycling and sharing of data.

Ecological Data will be particularly useful to those ecologists and information specialists that actively design, manage and analyse environmental databases, but will also benefit a wider audience of scientists and students in the ecological and environmental sciences.