About

Hello and welcome to MField: The University of Michigan Field Research and Data Hub.

Mfield is a comprehensive data repository and information management system for field based research at biological field stations at University of Michigan owned and operated properties throughout Michigan. The public facing web portal serves up datasets and their EML compliant metadata. These data sets serve as a hub for related content, exposing the relationships between field sites, research projects, the researchers involved, and publications or related research projects to the portal visitors.

To facilitate and enhance the data management process for researchers and data managers, Mfield is purpose built to provide data providers (researchers) with forms for generating EML compliant metadata, workflows for assisting data managers with the curation of data sets, and provides efficient methods for previewing and downloading publicly available datasets to external users. Specifically, data providers are provided a private file storage for various data file types prior to publication, while they complete the necessary metadata and related project information that enhances future usability and value. Data managers have a workflow that notifies them when new content is created and a mechanism to provide comments to data providers on the structure of their data and the completeness of the provided metadata. Additionally, the structure allows datasets and other site content to be related to one another in a many to many set of relationships. This allows for documentation of one piece of content that can be related many times. This provides consistency, facilitates reuse, and increases efficiency of managing the research products information. The generation of EML compliant metadata allows for the deposition of these data to public only, NSF supported repositories such as the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI), a DataONE member node.