Ensuring the Legacy Data for the Southern Right Whale is FAIR

Abstract

Worldwide the push is for research data to become FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. So what about legacy data? Vicki Rowntree, a Research Professor at the University of Utah, has been collecting behavioral and biological data of the Patagonia southern right whale since 1971 on over 3,000 individual whales. The dataset consists of over 84,000 slides of these whales for identification purposes, hand-drawn maps and a room full of file cabinets containing hand-written data sheets. Yes, she went digital when the world did and now has an out-of-date Microsoft Access database to add to the analog data. Other researchers have also been collecting longitudinal data on the southern right whale, Eubalaena australis, in Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil and South Africa. Obviously, the data were not collected and described following any standard procedure. Here at the University of Utah we are working towards bringing all the research together by hosting and standardizing the datasets. We will, in part, use some of the standardization procedure of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) to facilitate adding location data to their database. We are proposing to build a Web platform for accessing the data and tools to evaluate and analyze the data. This talk will be about our work and the Patagonia Right Whale.