A case study of ECN data conversion for korean and foreign ecological data integration

In recent decades, as it becomes increasingly important to monitor and research long-term ecological changes, worldwide attempts are being conducted to integrate and manage ecological data in a unified framework. Especially domestic ecological data in South Korea should be first standardized based on predefined common protocols for data integration, since they are often scattered over many different systems in various forms. Additionally, foreign ecological data should be converted into a proper unified format to be used along with domestic data for association studies. In this study, our interest is to integrate ECN data with Korean domestic ecological data under our unified framework. For this purpose, we employed our semi-automatic data conversion tool to standardize foreign data and utilized ground beetle (Carabidae) datasets collected from 12 different observatory sites of ECN. We believe that our attempt to convert domestic and foreign ecological data into a standardized format in a systematic way will be quite useful for data integration and association analysis in many ecological and environmental studies.