Cross-agency data collaboration for the North American Carbon Program

The central objective of the North American Carbon Program (NACP), a core element of the US Climate Change Science Program, is to quantify the sources and sinks of CO2, CO, and CH4 in North America and adjacent ocean regions. The NACP consists of a wide range of investigators at universities and federal research centers. Although many of these investigators have worked together in the past, many have had few prior interactions and may not know of similar work within knowledge domains, much less across the diversity of environments and scientific approaches in the Program. Thus, coordinating interactions and sharing data are major challenges in conducting NACP. The NACP website provides metadata describing each core and affiliated NACP project. These project-oriented metadata, or "project profiles", can store information such as a project's title, leaders, participants, an abstract, keywords, funding agencies, associated intensive field campaigns, expected data products, and URLs to data centers, datasets, and associated metadata. Examples of data products could include biometric inventories, flux tower estimates, remote sensing land cover products, tools, services, and model inputs / outputs. The NACP project profiles can provide the scientific and social context of each dataset and are an important means of communicating within the NACP and to the larger carbon cycle science community.