DMP Guide: NSF for Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

1. Funder Policy & Open Data Compliance

In alignment with international open-science mandates, National Science Foundation requires all principal investigators to submit a comprehensive Data Management Plan (DMP) with their grant application. A robust DMP details how research data will be collected, processed, documented, stored, shared, and preserved both during and after the project.

For projects in the field of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, managing data correctly is essential not only for compliance, but also to support peer-review validation and reproducibility. All DMPs must be submitted through the Research.gov portal, using standard institutional guidelines.

2. Data Types, Formats, and Metadata Standards

A high-quality DMP must explicitly identify the types of data that will be generated and specify open, non-proprietary file formats to ensure long-term usability. For Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, datasets typically range from raw observational measurements to curated computational models.

Research outputs for **Ecology & Evolutionary Biology** generally comprise historic scans, tabular registers, or structured texts. The DMP should describe plans to store all digital files in open, non-proprietary formats, protecting project deliverables from vendor lock-in under **NSF** awards.

To guarantee discoverability, datasets should be documented using standardised metadata schemas that map to the Biological Phenomena branch of scholarly vocabularies. This ensures indexers and crawlers can crawl and identify research outputs accurately.

3. Step-by-Step DMP Construction Protocol

When preparing your DMP for a NSF proposal, structure your document around these core sections:

1. Data Collection and Generation:
   Describe the methodology, instrumentation, or software used to collect or generate new data. Detail quality assurance and quality control measures implemented at your facility.
2. Documentation and Metadata:
   Explain how the data will be documented, including accompanying read-me files, data dictionaries, and laboratory notebooks. Specify the metadata standards to be utilized (using Darwin Core standard (DwC), Ecological Metadata Language (EML) as standard).
3. Ethics, Intellectual Property, and Consent:
   Address how sensitive or confidential datasets will be handled. Detail anonymisation processes, access controls, and compliance with institutional ethics boards.
4. Storage, Backups, and Security:
   State where data will be stored during active research. Detail automated backup schedules, server redundancies, and access authorisation protocols.
5. Long-Term Preservation and Archiving:
   Select the digital repository for post-project archiving (such as Dryad, GBIF, Zenodo, Figshare, and directory servers mapped in Biosis, Scopus & Dryad). Confirm that the repository supports persistent identifiers (handles/DOIs) and provides secure preservation.

Open Science Workflows, Data Curation & Repositories

When drafting a data management plan dmp to satisfy NSF guidelines, defining systematic data collection methods and formal data curation standards is vital. Utilizing institutional dmptool workflows ensures that these administrative requirements are built-in from the outset of the study. This includes describing protocols for data cleaning, validating data integrity via checksums, and conducting secure data wrangling on raw source files. Each output dataset must be documented with an explanatory data dictionary mapping key metadata fields. Architecturally, teams can configure either a secure relational data warehouse or a cost-effective cloud-based data lake, evaluating how this data lake vs data warehouse setup supports formal data analysis and immediate exploratory data analysis under NSF guidelines. PIs will facilitate public sharing by leveraging the dryad data repository, creating searchable figshare datasets, or completing a zenodo data upload, ensuring tracking through the data citation index in compliance with nsf data management plan protocols and National Science Foundation targets. The study will document clear data versioning protocols hosted on the open science framework osf to enable reproducible data sharing matching top fair data principles examples. Furthermore, any community-engaged data must respect the care data principles and support indigenous data sovereignty care standards to ensure local governance of shared knowledge under NSF audits. Implementing this storage layout satisfies compliance protocols overseen by the NSF data audit team.

4. Frequently Asked Questions