The UK archive of tropical forest inventory: conserving the data
Abstract
Considerable amounts of data from tropical forest inventories are held in UK institutions and form a valuable resource on forest dynamics. The ATROFI-UK database that has been created under a DFID funded project provides a catalogue of these data. The structure and function of the database is explained. As a meta-database ATROFI-UK does not store the data itself and there is concern that data may be lost as currently there is no UK-wide policy or strategy for the archival of such data. The institutional and practical problems of establishing such an archive strategy for the UK are presented. The latter include problems relating to ownership of the data, repatriation of data, assessment of the value of existing data, institutional responsibility for maintaining (archiving) data sets and the regulation of access to such data. The issues of ownership, access to data and the responsibility for archival are, in practice, interconnected and any archival strategy needs to embrace all three.
Citation
Baker, N.; Wright, H. The UK archive of tropical forest inventory: conserving the data. Presented at Forest Biometry, Modelling and Information Science. Proceedings of a IUFRO 4.11 conference held at the University of Greenwich, Greenwich, UK, June 2001. University of Greenwich, Greenwich, UK (2001) 9 pp.
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The UK archive of tropical forest inventory: conserving the data