Supporting Open and Equitable Urban Climate Research through Data Management

The Baltimore Social-Economic Consortium (BSEC) UIFL (https://21cc.jhu.edu/research/bsec/) is one of the four projects funded through the Department of Energy (DOE) UIFL program. The BSEC UIFL project focuses on the Baltimore metropolitan area, an area that is representative of the climate challenges faced by many mid-sized industrial cities in the US. The BSEC UIFL begins by establishing research priorities designed in partnership with both communities and city government agencies, evaluates the priorities in collaboration with these partners, and co-designs observational networks and models that will deliver the science capable of supporting those co-created priorities. This presentation describes the data management challenges that BSEC faces and introduces our strategies for managing diverse environmental information in a manner that supports open science that informs equitable pathways to more climate-resilient communities.

The environmental data products being collected and created by the BSEC UIFL project are highly diverse in many aspects, e.g., types of measurement, data structures and formats, volume, and persistent archives. For the 100+ BSEC UIFL science team members, making these diverse data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) is important to efficiently conduct research in a collaborative, open, and reproducible manner. For community stakeholders, making them FAIR is also critical for them to easily understand what the project offers and provide feedback to the project to foster a co-designed research process. More importantly, depending on the target users (e.g., researchers or community stakeholders), being FAIR means different things. In this presentation, we will describe these data management challenges and introduce the strategies we are planning to take to make diverse environmental data of the BSEC UIFL project easily usable by both skilled researchers and community users. These strategies include: understanding different data user needs, leveraging the MultiSector Dynamics – Living, Intuitive, Value-adding, Environment (MSD-LIVE, https://msdlive.org/) platform, establishing an integrated data catalog, standardizing data, providing thorough metadata and documentation, and creating intuitive data access and exploration tools for different types of users.