Palmer Station LTER SiteFlash - August 2001 - Karen Baker

FIELD SUPPORT by information management (IM) for the Palmer LTER annual January 
cruise and seasonal October through March station work included involvement 
with logistics, data archive and field procedures in addition to year round 
weather and biomass data collection.  Preparations are underway for the 
second ice study cruise September 2001 (late winter ice), complementing the 
earlier June 1999 (fall ice formation). 

COMMUNICATIONS for the Palmer team and the LTER network were augmented 
through electronic facilitation such as shared project work web pages
including an ongoing Palmer LTER group data sharing & modeling effort and 
steering committee review preparation (March 2000 at UCSB; June 2000 WashDC).  
A multi-site authored poster "LTER IM: Paradigm Shift or Paradigm Stretch" 
was designed for the LTER All Scientist Meeting.  The Site System survey, 
developed at a past LTER IM meeting, remained a useful online network summary. 
The LTER IM Newsletter DataBits, re-designed and re-initiated in Spring 1999, 
published Fall 2000 and Spring 2001 with rotating editorship as planned.

PALMER DATA files online were updated at the end of the field season. The 
previous year's relational database software testing (i.e. miniSQL, mySQL, 
access, SQLserver) stimulated this year's exploration of alternate synergistic 
database environments and partnerships. Further work is planned and will be 
supported through separate funding as possible.

LTER SITE DESCRIPTION DIRECTORY development was reviewed and developed at a 
meeting at the LTER Network Office (Feb01) with support from a one year NSF 
small grant. The three tiered prototype using SQLserver database software 
and perl for web interface developed at ICESS was ported and installed at 
the Network Office.

LTER INFORMATION SYSTEM, described in a multi-site manuscript (Baker, 
Benson, Henshaw, Blodgett, Porter and Stafford, Bioscience 2000), provides 
an overview of network information system considerations.  LTER component 
modules were addressed at the August 2000 All-Scientist Meeting in Snowbird, 
the concurrent Information Manager Meeting, and the Spring 2001 LTER IM 
Executive Committee Meeting in Phoenix.  

EDUCATION OUTREACH and information management partnership continued with 
additions to our Education Outreach Trunk. Plans are in place to sponsor 
a 'Teacher Experiencing Antarctica' (TEA) participant for 2001-2002 field 
season.  The LTER All-Scientist Meeting (Aug00) contributions included a 
Palmer site education poster. Schoolyard (SLTER) Aug00 education workshops 
culminated in a small SLTER working group San Diego Meeting (Dec00) 
organized by Karen Baker and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).
A poster "Long-Term Ecological Research Schoolyard Education Partner" was 
presented at the SDSC All-Hands Meeting in February.

INFRASTRUCTURE: The Institute for Computation Earth System Science (ICESS) 
provides the PAL LTER computational infrastructure.  ICESS transitioned from 
desktop unix to pc workstation-unix interface support.  A variety of recent 
upgrades include: windowsNT PC configuration transition to networked 
workstations with preparations underway for transition to Windows2000; 
file server upgrades addressing both fiber optic channel and scusi 
disk storage as part of a three-generational plan supporting both legacy 
and cutting edge systems; storage upgrade of 2.5TB for ICESS and 50GB 
for the Palmer LTER; service upgrades for FTP and color printer services 
in addition to software upgrades such as perl, matlab, idl; apache webserver 
upgrade & reconfiguration improving network services; network identity 
establishment via virtual host alias pal.lternet.edu; large format plotter 
purchase enabling generation of posters locally.