PNNL

Abstract

High-resolution environmental monitoring is necessary to record, understand, and predict biogeochemical and ecological changes, particularly in coastal systems, but brings significant challenges in processing and making rapidly available the resulting data. The COMPASS-FME project established a network of coastal observational sites across the Chesapeake Bay and western Lake Erie regions, extensively instrumented with soil, vegetation, and weather sensors logging data every 15 minutes. Our data processing framework, written in R and completely open source, prioritizes rapid model-experiment iteration and makes biogeochemical data rapidly available for quality assurance/quality control, analysis, and model ingestion. This pipeline is distinguished by a standardized and modular approach to data curation, extensive metadata and documentation, and its high performance. These attributes combine to make biogeochemical data rapidly accessible across COMPASS-FME and the broader community. Flexible, powerful, and reproducible approaches to handling high-volume environmental data are crucial for accelerating biogeosciences research.