Tropical coastal ecosystems are habitats of enormous ecological and economic importance. They are home to an impressive diversity of species and provide essential environmental services such as habitats for marine animals, climate regulation through carbon storage and the filtering of pollutants. At the same time, they are severely threatened by human activities such as overfishing, pollution and climate change.

The Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) aims to comprehensively research and protect these sensitive ecosystems. As the only scientific institute in Germany specializing in tropical and subtropical coastal ecosystems, the ZMT is internationally recognized. Its research focuses on the structure and function of these habitats, the use of resources and their resilience to human intervention and natural change.

The ZMT pursues an interdisciplinary approach that integrates both natural and social science methods. There are five scientific program areas and experimental marine laboratories that support research both locally and in tropical partner countries.

With its research, training and advisory activities, the ZMT contributes significantly to the global understanding and sustainable use of tropical coastal ecosystems. Particularly noteworthy is the ZMT's strength in the social sciences, through which it researches the livelihoods of communities in tropical coastal areas and strengthens their capacities.

The ZMT use case focuses on institutional research data management. The aim is to identify challenges in dealing with research data, develop corresponding concepts and guidelines and make these available to the community. This also includes testing and, if necessary, adapting best practices from the NFDI4Biodiversity partner network. In addition, historical data will be identified by the research data service with current relevance, annotated with metadata and published, if not already done so.

The Research Data Service at the ZMT works on identifying challenges in institutional research data management and developing customized solutions. The latter are then made available to the community as guidelines. In addition, the service plans to expand training and advice for ZMT researchers on all aspects of research data management. The focus will be on topics such as data management plans, budget planning, documentation, curation and annotation with metadata.

Close cooperation with the NFDI4Biodiversity network will enable the ZMT to promote and utilize training courses on the services and tools of the partner institutions. Tailor-made training courses are particularly relevant here. The ZMT's research data service in turn contributes to the organization of specific workshops within the framework of NFDI4Biodiversity, for example on geodata and metadata.

Data mobilization within the ZMT mobilizes both historical and current social and natural science research data as well as laboratory data. These are systematically collected and made visible with metadata in the ZMT DataPortal. By providing metadata for data searches in the NFDI Research Data Commons, the ZMT is to be more closely integrated into the National Research Data Infrastructure.

The research data service has already gained experience in connecting to external systems, such as the integration of the ZMT DataPortal into the Ocean Info Hub.

The Research Data Service at the ZMT supports scientists at the institute with needs-based products and services for managing their research data. Among other things, the involvement of the Research Data Service in the planning and application of research projects is to be expanded - especially in the creation of data management plans and budget planning. In addition, the Institute aims to continuously curate natural and social science research data, primarily through structured data storage and metadata annotation in the ongoing research process. By using a common data infrastructure and promoting uniform metadata standards, the ZMT aims to further strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration at the institute.

For many years, scientific research data from the ZMT has mainly been published in the PANGAEA data repository. In cooperation with external developers and our internal data curator, measures have been developed to fully identify historical ZMT data publications. The results are presented in the ZMT DataPortal with the corresponding metadata and linked to PANGAEA. The next step is to systematically record further published ZMT research data in other repositories.

Website of the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT)

ZMT DataPortal

NFDI4Biodiversity
Sarah Fischer (fischer.sarah@fbn-dummerstorf.de), Use Case Manager

Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT)
Dr. Birte Hemmelskamp-Pfeiffer (birte.hemmelskamp-pfeiffer@leibniz-zmt.de)
Nicolas Dittert (nicolas.dittert@leibniz-zmt.de)