SMEAR (Station for Measuring Earth Surface – Atmosphere Relations) network of the University of Helsinki and the University of Eastern Finland consists of research stations in eastern Lapland (SMEAR I), Pirkanmaa (SMEAR II), Helsinki (SMEAR III) and Kuopio (SMEAR IV). The stations contain large variety of field measurements that support the research of meteorology, air quality, exchange of greenhouse gases between the Earth surface and the atmosphere, and aerosol-cloud-climate interactions. The measurement data collected at SMEAR stations are available near real time at SmartSMEAR.
The data in SMEAR database at the time are periodically exported into findable and citable datasets in Fairdata Etsin. The first SMEAR data publications contained values of one variable (for instance, air temperature) over one year, with metadata harvested automatically from SMEAR database. This resulted in more than 7000 datasets. The large number of datasets proved impractical for finding the data or citing the data in research journal articles. Later, the datasets were aggregated station-wise and thematically, for instance, meteorology, air quality and soil measurements at SMEAR I station in 1992-2021 (http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:att:8b3c67b4-22c0-4589-be00-a3d0341064d5).
The new aggregated way to present the data support easier findability in Fairdata Etsin. Although the first SMEAR datasets are still accessible in Etsin via their persistent identifiers, they no longer show in Etsin’s own search results giving the more aggregated datasets more visibility in the service and citing the data becomes easier.
