The Butterfly Effect: An Approach to Web-Based Scientific Data Distribution and Management with Linkages to Climate Data and the Semantic Web

Environmental scientists generating longitudinal data that reliably track changes in biodiversity face additional challenges of data management and dissemination. An open source web framework can be used effectively to manage datasets while making research available at different levels of expertise, including for public environmental education. This chapter discusses the development of a web framework which links long-term butterfly presence/absence data with regional weather data, allowing researchers to investigate the relationship between butterfly populations and climate change, over time. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the semantic web, and how observational and monitoring data can become part of the growing Linked Data project.