RDA/IGAD Webinar Series: ‘Global Long-term Experiments in Agriculture Network (GLTEN) Metadata Portal’

As part of the Research Data Alliance's (RDA)/ Agricultural Data Interest Group's (IGAD) ongoing webinar series, aimed to keep up with cutting edge developments in agricultural data, and encourage the free flow of ideas, the latest webinar took place on 20 November 2019.

This webinar focused on ‘Global Long-term Experiments in Agriculture Network (GLTEN) Metadata Portal’ by Richard Ostler from the Rothamsted Research (United Kingdom).

The GLTEN was launched in May 2018 with the aim of establishing a collaborative international network for long-term agricultural experiments (LTEs). The GLTEN now represents over 50 LTEs across the world and covers diverse and contrasting climate and environmental regions, crops and land management systems. To improve the visibility of LTEs and LTE data the GLTEN has developed a searchable online metadata portal. The portal does not host data, but instead provides metadata about LTEs and directs users to the LTE data owners preferred data access process. The metadata portal uses a minimum information checklist approach to capture key facts about LTEs including design and treatment factors; cropping system; site characterisation including location, landscape, soil and climate properties; administrative information including data access & licensing, contacts and associated organisations; recorded measurements and observations and data availability. To ensure interoperability with related systems, the checklist is mapped to schema.org in line with DataCite mappings and metadata are annotated using existing publicly available ontologies and controlled vocabularies. Metadata are published using CC0 licensing and can be queried using the portal API.