Approaches to addressing ecological challenges are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, and access to ecological data through openly accessible data repositories facilitates broad-scale integrative research. While preserving data in long-term repositories has become relatively common practice in ecology, availability of valuable qualitative and social scientific data can be more limited due to concerns over treatment of human subjects or other sensitive data. However, qualitative and other social scientific data have much to contribute to ecological research questions, and identifying mechanisms for effective management and preservation of these data is essential.
The Arctic Data Center - the primary data and software repository for the Arctic section of NSF Polar Programs - works with the Arctic research community to reproducibly preserve and discover all data, metadata, and software products of NSF-funded science in the Arctic, regardless of research domain. Products of social scientific research in the Arctic often contain sensitive data, whether about Indigenous communities or protected grounds. To support the social scientific research community preserve and archive their data products in a scientifically, legally, and morally responsible way, the Arctic Data Center adopted a community-informed design, bringing together representatives from diverse Arctic social scientific disciplines to co-develop future training activities.
Results/Conclusions
In this presentation, we provide an overview of the community-based approach to handling sensitive data and highlight the outcomes of a workshop focused on social science data best practices. We discuss the challenges of handling sensitive data, whether human subject research or endangered species location, and address and assuage real and perceived roadblocks of participation in research sharing activities. We outline best practices for social scientists and ecologists to follow when submitting their data and metadata to repositories for re-use and preservation, including strategies to format data so that they can be more easily compared, discovered, and re-used. A wider availability of social science and natural science data, metadata, and software in long-term repositories enables the scientific community as a whole to distribute and synthesize interdisciplinary data to answer large-scale research questions in ecology and beyond.