About

PASTAplus (or PASTA+) is an ongoing project of the Environmental Data Initiative to design and develop robust and extensible software to operate and manage an environmental data repository. PASTAplus is also the core infrastructure of the EDI data repository.

PASTA began as the Provenance Aware Synthesis Tracking Architecture, an informatics project [1] of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network Office. Initial design and development of PASTA began in late 2009, with the culmination of a production release in January 2013 as the core infrastructure of the LTER Network Information System (NIS). The LTER NIS was the de facto and exclusive data repository for research data products of the LTER Network. PASTA supported the upload and archive of ecological data packages (science data and metadata), which consisted mainly of tabular data but could also include other products such as audio, imagery, or binary objects. The moniker “PASTA” transitioned to “PASTAplus,” along with dropping the acronym for the Provenance Aware Synthesis Tracking Architecture, in July 2016, with the end of the LTER Network Office project and the beginning of the Environmental Data Initiative. Informally, we still refer to the software as “PASTA.”

The PASTA+ data repository software is managed by the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI), a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project through the Division of Biological Infrastructure (DBI) under grants #2223103 and #2223104 at the University of Wisconsin and the University of New Mexico, respectively. The principal investigators of EDI are Dr. Corinna Gries (UW) and Dr. Mark Servilla (UNM). EDI has been operating since July 2016 and is a publisher and archivist of science data for the environmental and ecological science communities. EDI provides key services and technical expertise to the scientific community that ensure environmental and ecological data are well curated and accessible for discovery and re-use well into the future. We assist researchers from field stations, individual laboratories, and research projects of all sizes to archive and publish their environmental data. EDI is committed to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR).

Please refer to the project’s website for more information about the Environmental Data Initiative.