Environmental Data Management (EDM): Best Practices for Exchanging Environmental Data Training

The ITRC Environmental Data Management Best Practices Team (EDMBP Team) prepared a series of guidance documents and case studies on best practices for all phases of EDM to address the need for guidance on managing large stores of environmental data. Environmental data management (EDM) is a broad field that encompasses all aspects of environmental research and regulation, from habitat studies and wildlife management plans to health advisories and remediation of hazardous waste sites.

The EDMBP Team developed three Roundtable training sessions to support the Guidance Document and case studies. You are welcome to register for any of the three, but they do not build upon each other.

• Data Management: Real Life Application of Data Management Planning and Field Data Collection Best Practices
• Data Exchange: Best Practices for Exchanging Environmental Data
• Data Quality: Best Practices for Achieving and Maintaining Quality within Environmental Data Management

What good are data if you can't access it? At its root, data exchange is about making data accessible. It is the process of sharing data between systems. When it's done best, it is efficient, repeatable, and maintains the integrity of the data. At its worst, data are omitted, are mismatched, or there is no documentation on its origin. We think of data exchange in terms of incoming data and outgoing data. With incoming data, best practices span from inventorying sources to loading the data into a system. With outgoing data, best practices focus on documentation and automating exports into known schemas.

During this Roundtable training, we will tackle some of the challenging issues in data exchange. If you're new to data exchange, it may open your eyes. If you've been exchanging data for years, we hope to provide some new tricks or considerations for you. Some of the topics we'll cover include:

• What's the best way to handle using several analytical laboratories, each with a different electronic data deliverable (EDD)?
• When systems use different valid values and schema, how can you design an efficient, repeatable exchange?
• How do we know that the costly effort to extract, transform, and load the data from old PDFs into our system will provide value?
• If someone asks for "all the data" but doesn't have a plan for import to an existing system, how do you provide it in an understandable way in a raw format?

We want to answer your questions too. Are you wondering about how to handle analytes duplicated with multiple analytical methods? Or when you should automate or when to manually exchange? No question is too minor.

Evan Anway, Environmental Resources Management, Inc. (evan.anway@erm.com)
Mr. Anway is a data scientist with 6 years of consulting experience managing environmental databases and analyzing, modeling, and visualizing these data. He has migrated data, performed descriptive and inferential statistics, and developed applications for air quality, water elevation, and soil chemical concentration data.

Michael Ginsbach, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (michael.ginsbach@state.mn.us)
Michael Ginsbach is a hydrogeologist in the Remediation division of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency with a decade of experience collecting and managing hydrologic, geologic, chemical, and geophysical data. In his current position, he manages the investigation and remediation of contaminated sites in Minnesota in addition to leading data improvement, migration, and implementation efforts for the MPCA. He has Bachelor of Science degree’s in earth science education and geology from North Dakota State University and a master of science in geology from Idaho State University.

Dan McCarthy, EarthSoft (dan.mccarthy@earthsoft.com)
Dan McCarthy is a Senior Account Manager at EarthSoft, with over 34 years of experience providing expertise in environmental data management. Twenty-eight years of that experience has been in environmental consulting focusing on information management related to site investigation, groundwater and soil remediation, reserves management, product stewardship and emergency response. Dan also participated in the ITRC Environmental Data Management (EDM) team through the Industry Affiliate Program and has assisted in development of training materials for the guidance documents prepared by the EDM team. Dan has a Bachelor of Arts in Geology from Franklin and Marshall College.

Dreas Nielsen, Integral Consulting, Inc. (dnielsen@integral-corp.com)
Dreas Nielsen is a senior science advisor at Integral Consulting Inc. in Seattle, WA. He specializes in quantitative analysis of environmental data, and throughout his 40-year professional career has developed specialized databases, software, standards, and procedures to support these analyses by establishing and maintaining the highest practicable level of data quality. He has performed and managed the collection and analysis of biological, physical, chemical, and geographic data from sites throughout the United States. He has developed operational practices for the acquisition, cleaning, standardization, and integration of data from both historical studies and present-day investigations. This includes the management of data transfers between public agencies, analytical laboratories, and other private environmental practitioners.

Olga Stewart, Geosyntec Consultants (ostewart@geosyntec.com)
Olga Stewart has been managing field data for 15 years, developing solutions to streamline processes for data collection through reporting. She has prepared and used desktop and mobile tools, web-based and off-line tools, custom and off-the-shelf tools: whatever are the best tools for the project at the time. Olga has led several data migration efforts, often with digitizing hard copy and field-note based historical records. She has also developed several data exchange processes between field tools and reporting tools. Her focus is on making sure data are accessible and available for every data user; she interacts and plans with the entire team, from programmers and data managers to field techs and surveyors to modelers, analysts, and cartographers (and sometimes chemists). Olga works for Geosyntec Consultants in Anchorage, Alaska. She has a BS in Materials Science and Engineering and a BS in Integrated Business and Engineering from Lehigh University.

Victoria (Tori) Ward, Woodard & Curran (vward@woodardcurran.com)
Victoria (Tori) Ward is a Project Engineer at Woodard & Curran with seven years of experience as a data manager/scientist. Her work focuses on leveraging scripting languages such as R and Python along with knowledge of database applications to improve project data management and analysis workflows. She earned a B.S. in Hydrology with a minor in French from the University of New Hampshire and an M.S. in Environmental and Water Resources Systems Engineering from Cornell University.

Moderator:

ITRC Training Program (itrc@itrcweb.org)

• Slide Presentation for ITRC Environmental Data Management (785KB/PDF)

Webinar Slides and References:

• Slide Presentation for ITRC Environmental Data Management (785KB/PDF)

Additional Resources:

• Environmental Data Management Best Practices (EDMBP) Team Resources

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