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*Project overview* Protected lands, such as the McDowell Sonoran Preserve (hereafter referred to as the Preserve) in Scottsdale, Arizona, provide critical refuge for native biota and natural, ecological processes within and near urban environments. At the same time, a key feature that makes urban, open-space preserves so valuable − their proximity to urban areas − places strain on the ecological integrity of these systems through visitation, habitat fragmentation, and the introduction of exotic species among others. Effective management of these systems requires detailed knowledge of the biota within the protected area, and monitoring of ecological indicators through time. Arthropods are well suited to monitoring ecological health. This diverse group of organisms typically reflects overall biological diversity of a system, and includes several trophic levels; their short generation times mean they will likely respond quickly to change; and they are relatively easy to sample. As part of a broad effort by the McDowell Sonoran Conservance Field Institute, an organization that oversees science and research in Preserve, to establish a baseline inventory of biota in the Preserve, investigators with the Central Arizona−Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) program at Arizona State University (ASU) in collaboration with Field Institute Citizen Scientists are monitoring ground-dwelling arthropods at select locations that reflect a diversity of habitat within the Preserve. Investigators employ a sampling design that is intended to provide insight regarding influence of the urban-wildland interface on the arthropod community within the protected area. The simple but effective technique of pitfall trapping is used to sample ground-dwelling arthropods at select locations spanning a wide range of habitat with the Preserve. Additional collections of vegetation-dwelling arthropods have been conducted at the sampling locations at periodic intervals. *Project design and sampling* Pitfall trap transect locations include five groups of paired transects that span a large range of the north-south and east-west axes of the Preserve, and include numerous unique vegetation communities. Four transect pairs are positioned such that one transect is within 100 m of the Preserve boundary and existing development, and the second transect at least 0.5 km from the Preserve boundary-development. A fifth paired transect treated as a control is located in a similar fashion but at a location where there is not currently development near the Preserve boundary (Dixie Mine and Prospector sites). Transect locations were selected specifically to include relatively similar geomorphological characteristics, including elevation (610-914 m), slope (≤ 20%), and aspect (0-270°, 315-360°) to minimize extraneous factors. All transects are positioned within 75 m of existing trails to facilitate access and limit off-trail travel while keeping traps out of public view. Sampling is conducted quarterly in keeping with CAP LTER protocols and concomitant sampling at other Valley location. 

*Project overview* Protected lands, such as the McDowell Sonoran Preserve (hereafter referred to as the Preserve) in Scottsdale, Arizona, provide critical refuge for native biota and natural, ecological processes within and near urban environments. At the same time, a key feature that makes urban, open-space preserves so valuable − their proximity to urban areas − places strain on the ecological integrity of these systems through visitation, habitat fragmentation, and the introduction of exotic species among others. Effective management of these systems requires detailed knowledge of the biota within the protected area, and monitoring of ecological indicators through time. Arthropods are well suited to monitoring ecological health. This diverse group of organisms typically reflects overall biological diversity of a system, and includes several trophic levels; their short generation times mean they will likely respond quickly to change; and they are relatively easy to sample. As part of a broad effort by the McDowell Sonoran Conservance Field Institute, an organization that oversees science and research in Preserve, to establish a baseline inventory of biota in the Preserve, investigators with the Central Arizona−Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) program at Arizona State University (ASU) in collaboration with Field Institute Citizen Scientists are monitoring ground-dwelling arthropods at select locations that reflect a diversity of habitat within the Preserve. Investigators employ a sampling design that is intended to provide insight regarding influence of the urban-wildland interface on the arthropod community within the protected area. The simple but effective technique of pitfall trapping is used to sample ground-dwelling arthropods at select locations spanning a wide range of habitat with the Preserve. Additional collections of vegetation-dwelling arthropods have been conducted at the sampling locations at periodic intervals. *Project design and sampling* Pitfall trap transect locations include five groups of paired transects that span a large range of the north-south and east-west axes of the Preserve, and include numerous unique vegetation communities. Four transect pairs are positioned such that one transect is within 100 m of the Preserve boundary and existing development, and the second transect at least 0.5 km from the Preserve boundary-development. A fifth paired transect treated as a control is located in a similar fashion but at a location where there is not currently development near the Preserve boundary (Dixie Mine and Prospector sites). Transect locations were selected specifically to include relatively similar geomorphological characteristics, including elevation (610-914 m), slope (≤ 20%), and aspect (0-270°, 315-360°) to minimize extraneous factors. All transects are positioned within 75 m of existing trails to facilitate access and limit off-trail travel while keeping traps out of public view. Sampling is conducted quarterly in keeping with CAP LTER protocols and concomitant sampling at other Valley location. 

Automated processing of environmental data is hindered by the wide array of unit representations provided in the metadata of digital datasets. For example, gm/m2, g/m2, gm-2, g/m^2, g.m-2 and gramPerMeterSquared are all representations of a single complex unit that might be human-readable but are not machine-interpretable. Connecting ad hoc units to a single unit concept in an ontology permits the identification of datasets sharing units and provides additional information regarding labels, definitions, dimensions and transformations provided in the ontology. Here we use successive string transformations to link ad hoc unit representations to units in the QUDT ontology (e.g., unit: GM-PER-M2). Although only 896 of 7,110 distinct units in a corpus of ecological metadata from DataONE, the Environmental Data Initiative and the U.S. National Ecological Observatory Network were matched, 324,811 unit uses (instances) out of 355,057 of total unit uses were successfully mapped to QUDT units (91%). The resulting lookup table was used to enable a web service and R functions for adding annotation elements to Ecological Metadata Language documents. 

In the metadata of digital environmental datasets, automated processing is hindered by the wide variety of representations for unit that may be human-readable, but may not be unambiguous or machine-interpretable, (e.g., grams per square meter, gm/m2, g/m2, gm-2, g/m^2, g.m-2, g m-2 and gramPerMeterSquared). Matching disparate representations of the same unit into a single unit concept from an ontology assists with interpretation and reuse by providing a linkage to a complete unit definitions with label, description, dimensions. Datasets with shared units can be identified during searches, and are more suitable for automating analyses and potential transformation. This dataset contains data and code associated with a project to map units in ecological metadata collected between 2013 and 2022 by DataONE, the Environmental Data Initiative and the U.S. National Ecological Observatory Network to the QUDT ontology using successive string transformations. Data entities include a) raw metadata as received (355,057 unit instances); b) integrated raw data; c) substitution tables for string transformations; d) resulting lookup table for 896 distinct units matched to QUDT units; e) associated R code used for QUDT matching plus a web service and R functions for adding annotation elements to Ecological Metadata Language metadata documents. Using these substitutions and code, 91% of unit instances in the raw metadata could be matched to QUDT. Data and results are discussed in “Porter JH, M O’Brien, M Frants, S Earl, M Martin, C Laney. (in review) Using a Units Ontology to Annotate Pre-Existing Metadata. Submitted to Scientific Data. 

Preservation of undeveloped land near urban areas is a common conservation practice. However, ecological processes may still be affected by adjacent anthropogenic activities. Ground-dwelling arthropods are a diverse group of organisms that are critical to ecological processes such as nutrient cycling, which are sensitive to anthropogenic activities. Here, we study arthropod dynamics in a preserve located in a heavily urbanized part of the Sonoran Desert, Arizona, U.S.. We compared arthropod biodiversity and community composition at ten locations, four paired sites representing the urban edge and one pair in the Preserve interior. In total, we captured and identified 25,477 arthropod individuals belonging to 287 lowest practical taxa (LPT) over eight years of sampling. This included 192 LPTs shared between interior and edge sites, with 44 LPTs occurring exclusively in interior sites and 48 LPTs occurring exclusively in edge sites. We found two site pairs had higher arthropod richness on the preserve interior, but results for evenness were mixed among site pairs. Compositionally, the interior and edge sites were more than 40% dissimilar, driven by species turnover. Importantly, we found that some differences were only apparent seasonally; for example edge sites had more fire ants than interior sites only during the summer. We also found that temperature and precipitation were strong predictors of arthropod composition. Our study highlights that climate can interact with urban edge effects on arthropod biodiversity. 

Abstract Wildfires have increased in size, frequency, and intensity in arid regions of the western United States because of human activity, changing land use, and rising temperature. Fire can degrade water quality, reshape aquatic habitat, and increase the risk of high discharge and erosion. Drawing from patterns in montane dry forest, chaparral, and desert ecosystems, we developed a conceptual framework describing how interactions and feedbacks among material accumulation, combustion of fuels, and hydrologic transport influence the effects of fire on streams. Accumulation and flammability of fuels shift in opposition along gradients of aridity, influencing the materials available for transport. Hydrologic transport of combustion products and materials accumulated after fire can propagate the effects of fire to unburned stream–riparian corridors, and episodic precipitation characteristic of arid lands can cause lags, spatial heterogeneity, and feedbacks in response. Resolving uncertainty in fire effects on arid catchments will require monitoring across hydroclimatic gradients and episodic precipitation. 

Abstract Increased occurrence, size, and intensity of fire result in significant but variable changes to hydrology and material retention in watersheds with concomitant effects on stream biogeochemistry. In arid regions, seasonal and episodic precipitation results in intermittency in flows connecting watersheds to recipient streams that can delay the effects of fire on stream chemistry. We investigated how the spatial extent of fire within watersheds interacts with variability in amount and timing of precipitation to influence stream chemistry of three forested, montane watersheds in a monsoonal climate and four coastal, chaparral watersheds in a Mediterranean climate. We applied state-space models to estimate effects of precipitation, fire, and their interaction on stream chemistry up to five years following fire using 15 + years of monthly observations. Precipitation alone diluted specific conductance and flushed nitrate and phosphate to Mediterranean streams. Fire had positive and negative effects on specific conductance in both climates, whereas ammonium and nitrate concentrations increased following fire in Mediterranean streams. Fire and precipitation had positive interactive effects on specific conductance in monsoonal streams and on ammonium in Mediterranean streams. In most cases, the effects of fire and its interaction with precipitation persisted or were lagged 2–5 years. These results suggest that precipitation influences the timing and intensity of the effects of fire on stream solute dynamics in aridland watersheds, but these responses vary by climate, solute, and watershed characteristics. Time series models were applied to data from long-term monitoring that included observations before and after fire, yielding estimated effects of fire on aridland stream chemistry. This statistical approach captured effects of local-scale temporal variation, including delayed responses to fire, and may be used to reduce uncertainty in predicted responses of water quality under changing fire and precipitation regimes of arid lands. 

Abstract. In the age of big data, soil data are more available and richer than ever, but – outside of a few large soil survey resources – they remain largely unusable for informing soil management and understanding Earth system processes beyond the original study.Data science has promised a fully reusable research pipeline where data from past studies are used to contextualize new findings and reanalyzed for new insight.Yet synthesis projects encounter challenges at all steps of the data reuse pipeline, including unavailable data, labor-intensive transcription of datasets, incomplete metadata, and a lack of communication between collaborators.Here, using insights from a diversity of soil, data, and climate scientists, we summarize current practices in soil data synthesis across all stages of database creation: availability, input, harmonization, curation, and publication.We then suggest new soil-focused semantic tools to improve existing data pipelines, such as ontologies, vocabulary lists, and community practices.Our goal is to provide the soil data community with an overview of current practices in soil data and where we need to go to fully leverage big data to solve soil problems in the next century.