This site is intended to serve as a source for identifying datasets that are useful to the study of ecology and quickly figuring out the best ways to use them. The idea is to use the knowlege and effort of the entire ecological community to compile this information rather than relying on each scientist to contribute information for their own studies. Just think of it as the Wikipedia of ecology data.
The site is developed and maintained by Ethan White and has been strongly influenced by input from Zack Brym, Morgan Ernest, and Allen Hurlbert. But this isn't our site, it's everyones site, and the hope is that decisions will be collectively made by the community of users. If there are any Drupal developers that want to lend a hand with developing the site, Ethan would be more than happy to have some help.
The site runs on the Drupal content management system and hosting costs are currently covered by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Given the low annual costs of operation it should be relatively easy to maintain this site semi-permanently.
All content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Basically you are free to do whatever you want with the content as long as you acknowledge the source. This license only applies to content on EcologicalData.org. Sites that are linked to from our dataset pages (i.e., the sites that host the actual data) will have their own licenses and terms of use for both the web content and the data themselves. Please respect the rules associated with the data sites so that folks who are sharing data are encouraged to continue to do so.