Where the LTER Network meets the Genomics Standards Consortium

The Genomics Standards Consortium (GSC) creates and disseminates metadata and data standards that facilitate data interoperability through a collaborative process amongst its stakeholders.  Novel sequencing techniques allows us to see molecular diversity on its environment, thus, we can begin to correlate the ecosystems diversity at all scales and dimensions. This new paradigm presents new data interoperability challenges and opportunities for the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network. The authors present here a harmonization of the metadata and data standards used at LTER and the GSC to overcome some of the technical data challenges.  In this poster, we offer an overview of the GSC and its projects, and describe some details of activities conducted by the LTER-GSC Biodiversity Working Group towards harmonization.  Specifically, we describe a metadata harmonization case study used based on the data collected and integrated by the Microbial Inventory Research Across Diverse Aquatic project. We also mention other GSC initiatives of interest to LTER researchers and information managers