ess-dive-community / essdive-location-metadata

READY TO USE. Reporting format for describing point locations.

ESS-DIVE Reporting Format for location metadata v 1.0.0

About the reporting format

ESS-DIVE's location reporting format is intended to guide users in providing a minimal set of metadata about locations.

This reporting format was developed by synthesizing the requirements for reporting locations from ESS-DIVE's existing reporting formats. We also took into consideration 12 other locations-related standards, conventions, guidelines, and reporting formats to determine which elements would constitute a minimal set of appropriate metadata.

Quickstart Guide

1. Read reporting format instructions to understand how to fill out templates.
2. Review our terminology guide to understand definitions of each term used in the templates.
3. Download blank copy of reporting format template
4. Save your completed locations metadata template as a CSV file and upload to ESS-DIVE as part of your dataset.

How to contribute

We encourage users to contribute to this reporting format. Please submit any comments or suggestions via a GitHub issue or by emailing ESS-DIVE support at ess-dive-support at lbl.gov

Licensing information

This repository content is licensed for use under the CC BY 4.0 license

Funding and acknowledgments

Funding for the development of ESS-DIVE's location metadata reporting format was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Climate and Environmental Science Division, Data Management program under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231.

Recommended citation

Crystal-Ornelas R; O'Ryan D; Christianson D; Hendrix V C; Agarwal D; Varadharajan C (2022): ESS-DIVE Reporting Format for Location Metadata. ESS-DIVE repository. Dataset. doi: 10.15485/1865730

essdive-location-metadata's Issues

Parsing Issue: Variable/term naming conventions

Capitalization of variable names has resulted in inconsistencies that cause parsing issues. I recommend revising the reporting format so that all term names are in snake case formatting, using all lowercase letters and underscores for separation.

Revisit term Elevation

Submitter: Danielle Christianson

I suggest the following changes:
Revisit the term "Elevation".
It is currently defined as "Elevation at point with respect to earth's surface given as a heigh or depth relative to ground surface" and has no units.

Typically, the vertical distance relative to the local ground surface (or other feature) is called height or depth.
Elevation is usually the vertical distance to a global reference system.
The current definition confuses these 2 common practices.

Also, the use of ground surface can be confusing / not appropriate when water bodies are in play and/or remote sensing technologies.

Units should be defined at a minimum. If elevation is truly desired, a datum should be specified in the definition or added as a separate field for users to specify.

In land-based measurements, sometimes elevation is reported as the globally-referenced ground surface height and a local measurement height / depth is reported referenced to that ground surface.