As of May 2005, Coweeta LTER has successfully participated in joining the Metacat Data Harvest Program, allowing our data to be shared across many other servers and clearinghouses. Coweeta will be also at the NBII portals for search.  Metadata will be automatically transformed into the BDP (Biological Data Profile), an FDGC metadata standard.

Coweeta LTER's position on support of EML:
The Information Management Advisory Group of LTERNET has made a recommendation that all LTER sites support a common data metadata format.  Coweeta LTER, in an effort to support the efforts of the LTER information management community, has translated all dataset metadata into EML format.  Coweeta LTER is 100% compliant, as of May 2004.
Example of Coweeta EML metadata.

Coweeta Data Set Summaries (Example), which may be considered 'human friendly' metadata, are the primary resource for describing Coweeta LTER research projects, and are based upon EML metadata.

About Ecological Metadata Language
Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is a metadata specification developed by the ecology discipline and for the ecology discipline. It is based on prior work done by the Ecological Society of America and associated efforts (Michener et al., 1997, Ecological Applications). EML is implemented as a series of XML document types that can by used in a modular and extensible manner to document ecological data. Each EML module is designed to describe one logical part of the total metadata that should be included with any ecological dataset.