R2R Data Management Services for the Academic Fleet: 2020-2024 award

The Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R) program has achieved its primary developmental objectives during its initial five years of operation, 2009 - 2014, and successfully transitioned to an operation and management phase with renewed five-year funding, 2014 - 2019. Renewed funding will enable continued operations and maintenance of this data management service. Work in the next five years includes continued operation of core infrastructure developed in the developmental phase of funding, as well as selected new enhancements and activities designed to improve R2R's products and services in response to Advisory Committee feedback and user's requests.

Broader Impacts

Benefits of R2R will extend to key stakeholders including vessel operators, research scientists, data management researchers, cyber-infrastructure developers, funding agencies, and the public. R2R will provide tools and feedback to help marine technicians improve data quality and documentation and will free them from the need to maintain a local data archive. A central cruise catalog for the academic fleet will ensure that original field data from every cruise are routinely preserved and disseminated, improving access for scientists and the public and simplifying funding agency efforts to enforce data sharing requirements. Standardization of data acquisition procedures across the fleet will facilitate integration with observations from other platforms such as NSF's Ocean Observatories Initiative, while enabling new synthesis efforts for a global ocean that is vast and sparsely explored.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.