Practical guidance for integrating data management into long‐term ecological monitoring projects

摘要: Long-term monitoring and research projects are essential to understand ecological change the effectiveness of management activities. An inherent characteristic long-term is need for consistent data collection over time, requiring rigorous attention quality assurance. Recent papers have provided broad recommendations management; however, practitioners more detailed guidance examples. We present general yet development comprehensive, concise, effective projects. The presented as a graded approach, matching scale needs organization complexity project. address following topics: roles responsibilities; precise collection; calibration field crews instrumentation; tabular, photographic, video, sound data; completeness quality; metadata; archiving evaluation existing from other sources. This will help execute management, thereby, improving usability meeting project objectives well broader meta-analysis macrosystem ecology research. © 2015 Authors. Wildlife Society Bulletin published by Society.