Beginning with the End in Mind: Creating a Geospatial Research Data Portal for Energy-Water-Climate Research in the Great Lakes Region

Data management is sometimes an afterthought, or a task completed in a rush at the end of a project. In this project a data portal was used to collect, analyze, visualize and document datasets during the formation of a research team. The multidisciplinary team is studying the effects of energy transitions, climate change, and water stress in the Great Lakes region. In the summer of 2021 we began creating this community of researchers composed of faculty, professional staff, and students from engineering, climate science, and social sciences. We met to discuss research ideas that would require the expertise of multiple disciplines, and allocated time to collecting relevant datasets. Key to the utility of this data was the Great Lakes Energy-Water-Climate Research Portal, a geospatial hub which is a central point for analyzing, combining, storing, and sharing the datasets. Graduate students directed by professional staff collected existing datasets and metadata in the Portal. The Portal supports public datasets, restricted use datasets, data management training materials, a public-facing website, and the use of web and mobile applications. While the initial datasets established in the Portal will be a resource for existing projects, the team will use the Portal as a place to document and share additional datasets during future projects. By beginning with the end in mind, this project sought to position the team for efficient proposal development (by accelerating team formation and creating preliminary datasets) and support the open science in future work (by publishing and documenting datasets that can be used in future work and training graduate students on good data management practices). We will share both the outputs of the process (the Portal) and our experience with the process itself.