Introducing the sandsuet data specification
We are thrilled to announce the official publication of our new short communication in Earth Surface Dynamics (ESurf): “The need for open-source hardware, software, and data-sharing specifications in geomorphology.”
As geomorphologists, we have entered an incredibly data-rich scientific era. Between affordable custom sensors, high-resolution drone-based lidar, and continuous satellite observations, we have more data and computational resources available than ever before. However, our community has long lacked the specialized tools and common frameworks needed to make collaboration integrating these data sets fluid and reproducible.
The Core Challenges
In our paper, we reflect on insights gathered from a community workshop focused on the needs for collaboration and data reuse. From these conversations, we identified four key challenges to collaboration in the geomorphology community:
- Data archival and data sharing serve distinct but complementary purposes.
- A geomorphology and sedimentology analysis software tool must be modular.
- A lower-cost experimental hardware system is needed to sustain this mode of inquiry.
- Building a community around open-source tools in geomorphology depends on a system to pass credit along to creators.
Introducing sandsuet
To directly address the urgent need for flexible data sharing, we have established the sandsuet analysis-ready data specification (v1.0).
Rather than attempting to standardize complex archival metadata, sandsuet focuses on ease of use for secondary analysis.
It is an open-source, flexible metadata and structural schema optimized for sharing rasterized, gridded geomorpholgy datasets (such as digital elevation models, sediment transport grids, and morphodynamic model outputs).
By providing a lightweight, standard structural footprint, sandsuet makes it straightforward to package, publish, and immediately reuse datasets across different software toolchains.
Figure 1: Example data in the
sandsuet format. See *Earth Surface Dynamics* paper for complete details.
Get Involved
Open science only works when the community shapes it. We want to invite everyone to try out the specification, integrate it into your active data pipelines, and give us feedback!
- Read the Paper: You can access the full open-access article on Earth Surface Dynamics.
- Explore the Code & Schema: Check out our development, repository guidelines, and schema documentation on the official repository. We welcome issues, pull requests, and discussions!
We want to thank all of our workshop participants and collaborators who contributed their insights to this effort. Let’s build a more connected, collaborative geomorphology community together!