INTRODUCTION

The Information and Data Management System (IMS) at the Luquillo Experimental Forest (LEF) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Long-Term Ecological Research (LUQ or LEF LTER) program began in 1988. First data translations were done with precipitation and temperature, and the water and soil chemistry data. Certainly, the gathering and transformation of data at the Forest has a much older history. When we began looking at our old files of data we realized the importance of giving a structure to the activities involved in gathering, saving, and transforming data, particularly that of documenting the data gathered.

The LUQ LTER IMS system is a collection of documents, protocols, databases and computer tools organized in such a way that allows the preservation of old data files, filing new ones along with their metadata, and in summary, serving the scientific community for the transformation, preservation and access of the LUQ’s ecological data. These documents were created with the purpose of conserving the data generated by our scientists for future reference and give support to the research performed at this site by the scientific community.

The Protocols section includes the policies of Data Management to release data gathered with the funding of the LTER program, and also the forms to request these data when not accessible online or when special transformations of the data is requested (e.g., summaries). A copy of the paragraph to acknowledge the NSF support for all publications funded in any way by current and future LTER grants is also included in this section. The Guidelines and Documentation Form section consists of a copy of the documentation (metadata) form that must be filed along with a data set. The guidelines to fill out these documentation forms contain all the information needed by the investigator to perform this essential task.