Information management at the North Temperate Lakes Long-term Ecological Research site - Successful support of research in a large, diverse, and long running project.

Information management has been an integral part of the research process at the North Temperate Lakes Long-term Ecological Research (NTL LTER) program for over 30years. A combination of factors has made the information management system (IMS) at NTL very successful. Significant resources have been invested in the IMS from the beginning, the Information Manager has been part of the leadership team at NTL and later in various roles at the LTER network level; the NTL IMS was a very early adopter of database systems, standardized metadata, and a data delivery system based on those metadata. This approach has made data easily accessible to NTL researchers and the broader scientific community. Data management workflows have become increasingly more automated with adoption of modern technologies as they became available, making the system efficient enough to handle core data as well as all one-time research data generated within NTL and several related projects. More than three decades of core data from eleven lakes are reused extensively as critical background information and as the limnological go-to site for many synthesis projects within and beyond LTER.