The Mohonk Preserve sits on the Shawangunk Ridge, New York State; the local aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems have been managed and preserved for over 40 years. However, the Shawangunk Ridge ecosystem is not isolated from anthropogenic effects. For example, given the location of the Ridge downwind of fossil fuel emissions, acid precipitation has been a problem for both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems over the past 50 years. The Smiley family has owned and operated the Mohonk Mountain House, a hotel on the Shawangunk Ridge. The Smiley family started a legacy of natural history and observation which has resulted in one of the oldest and most comprehensive phenological records combined with more than a century of daily weather data and observations of acid precipitation and aquatic ecosystems. Our first objective is to demonstrate the possibility for data curation and publication through the Environmental Data Initiative, an NSF-funded project accelerating curation and archive of environmental data. Our second objective is to examine trends in acid precipitation over the past 40 years on the Shawangunk Ridge.
Results/Conclusions:
The Environmental Data Initiative is committed to enable FAIR data with “FAIR” defined as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable in the Guiding Principles of the Global Open FAIR Initiative. EDI operates a secure data repository and promotes data management best practices and stewardship. With their assistance, we published our long-term dataset by quality checking the data and ensuring the data presentation was conducive to analyses. We built metadata through the EML Assembly Line R code package that constructs an ecological metadata language (EML). The EML Assembly Line was used to publish the Mohonk Preserve’s acid precipitation data, making it accessible to the public. Prior to Dec 1991, the precipitation was acidic with a median pH of 4.0. From Dec 1991 to Dec 2015, the median pH was 4.6 ± 0.4 (± quartiles). Over that time, there was an increase in precipitation pH with an increasing slope of 0.56 ± 0.005 pH units decade-1 ± SE. Across this region and around the world, the rate of recovery from acid precipitation can affect the return of acid-sensitive freshwater and terrestrial ecological communities. Publishing publically accessible datasets will facilitate regional and global understanding of ecological issues.