Research Reference Site: a.k.a. The Big Canopy Database (BCD)

This web-accessible database consolidates information and data of concern to forest canopy researchers [canopy.evergreen.edu/bcd].

The first prototype BCD was implemented in HTML, but has since been converted to a database-driven application, using HTML, ASP.NET and MS SQL Server. Our long term  plan is to

1. enable a team of geographically distributed curators to enter information so that the community can more easily contribute and peer-review reference data. Until then, the BCD will be maintained by the International Canopy Network.
2. because one of the major bottlenecks for researchers to archive ecological data is the time needed to describe data sets, we want to provide this capability in the BCD. The BCD provides source tables for metadata field data descriptions. An overlap of content between BCD data and DataBank metadata would mean that canopy researchers who deposit field data in Databank could document their databases with a shared vocabulary by using existing reference data.