Curated Datasets
Community garden data is often housed within state and city data portals (see below). There exists research data, but their access and use will have to be more specialized. Each of these portals utilizes different metadata standards and holds different data content. Including how “community gardens” are defined, as our protocol is only interested in gardens that produce food. One of the first steps to curating this data into a singular location will be to standardize metadata for the collection and normalize the data that is available. Variables about the gardens and their services are of particular interest, including: the GIS data, governing entities (of which there may be several), populations served, produce grown, and tools available for use. To enhance the interoperability of garden data, relationships between submission elements and Digging In elements will be established; Digging In’s metadata schema has been developed to work with other geographic-based standards (see Metadata Section).
In addition to collating pre-existing data, our protocol will also include a mechanism for community members to contribute data. Due to the localized nature of community gardens, enabling contributions will allow for our datasets to become more robust over time on a level of detail not possible through aggregation.
Repository
Four sources of community garden data were curated and included in this protocol as examples of data treatment.
Cleaned datasets, data dictionary, and associated files can be found on Digging In's GitHub Repository.
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