FAIRsharing record for: TERN AEKOS

This FAIRsharing record describes: The Advanced Ecological Knowledge and Observation System (?KOS) is a data and ?research methods? knowledge base of Australia?s terrestrial plants, animals and their environments. Links are also provided to related data stored in other thematic repositories (e.g., soil metabarcoding data) where appropriate. It was built to meet the needs of the ecosystem science, tertiary education, natural resource management industry and government sectors. AEKOS has four key services: self-service data submission (SHaRED - http://www.shared.org.au/) with DOIs for provenance, versioning and citations for uploading scientific datasets, Integrated Site Data (ISD) upload, access and intelligible reuse via its portal (http://www.aekos.org.au/) and a visualisation of TERN AusPlots plant survey data (Soils-to-Satellites - http://www.soils2satellites.org.au/). ISD upload service involves specialist ecological knowledge modelling of data that?s mapped to the AEKOS ontological, ?methods description? and trait information models. Unlike self-service data submission, this service enables users to view the actual observations and measurements contained within data files - it maximises transparency. AEKOS is in the pipeline for Thomson & Reuters Data Citation Index with expected release in August 2016. There are currently 96,657 sites for mostly plants and their environmental data observed using 233,556 ?plots?. Animal site data is growing with a 20-year plus ongoing desert monitoring program on plants and animals (13 sites with 25 plots) and an inventory survey of the globally unique platypus (277 sites with 2,134 plots). Regular updates for ongoing datasets occur quarterly. Responsive user support for SHaRED and AEKOS data download is available.