Background, Definition, & Scope

Community gardens within the United States are traditionally defined as “collaborative projects on shared open spaces where participants share in the maintenance and products of the garden, including healthful and affordable fresh fruits and vegetables” (“Healthy Places,” 2010). Community gardens are also mechanisms for measuring food security within a neighborhood ensuring that “all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food,” (“Food Security,” n.d.; “Definitions of Food Security,” 2018). Community gardens, are also bountiful in the ways that they provide and collect data; from jurisdiction assignments to common produce grown, community gardens can provide a vast ecosystem of data for researchers, policy makers, and community members alike.

The ability to analyze community garden data on a larger scale will assist in a collaborative approach to community resilience in the form of actionable research and understanding. Data regarding community gardens in the U.S. are recorded at the local and national level through various entities; to date there is not a single location that houses this data, making it relatively inaccessible. This is a protocol for the curation and potential reuse of data surrounding community garden’s. Included in this narrative are a manifesto that outlines background motivations for curating data about community gardens as they relate to United States food security and the ways in which we determine location of community resources. In this background and protocol scope, we’ll be exploring the data audience and data types that will follow through the policies and procedures. Further sections include: an in-depth exploration of the user community; discussion on repository software needs; deposit, ingestion, transformation, and licensing policies; metadata standards and application; curated datasets; and future directions.

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