This newsletter summarizes new improvements and features in the System for Earth Sample Registration (SESAR²) as well as recent outreach and user highlights. Click on the links below for more detailed information.

Since November 5,011 samples were registered in SESAR². Browse the complete SESAR² catalog with more than 4.3 million samples.

SESAR² v.7.2.2 was released in November 2018. This new version introduced improved validation and new functionality for the Sub-Object Type and Classification fields and implemented a new version (4.0) of web service schema. See more release notes here.

The SESAR² team attended the AGU Fall Meeting held in Washington D.C from December 10-14, 2018. See more information below about our presentations at AGU, which included presentations about the IGSN and SESAR² and participation in a town hall regarding geochemical data standards. If you were not able to catch up with us at AGU, contact us at info@54.224.199.193 with questions or comments about our resources.IGSN: Toward a Mature and Generic Persistent Identifier for Samples: This presentation discussed the evolution of the IGSN and our efforts to redesign and improve its existing organization and technical architecture. Slides from this talk can be found here.Increasing the Impact of Your Research by Enabling Persistently FAIR Physical Samples: The System for Earth Sample Registration (SESAR²): This poster discussed the benefits of using IGSNs and SESAR², and how SESAR² has grown beyond individual investigators to include repositories, museums, and many large-scale scientific initiatives.Building a Global Network of Geochemical Data: This townhall discussed developing geochemical data standards in the Earth Sciences (and the IGSN as an existing standard that has improved discoverability) and opportunities for a global geochemical data network.

Dr. Kerstin Lehnert and SESAR² participated in PIDapalooza 2019, a conference dedicated to persistent identifiers (PIDs). Dr. Lehnert gave a presentation titled “Transitioning an Identifier System to Persistence” where she discussed the recent Sloan-funded effort to develop a mature organizational and technical structure for the IGSN that is scalable and extensible to other domains, ensuring persistence.

SESAR² participated in the annual assembly of members of the International Implementation Organization for the IGSN (IGSN e.V.). The objective of the IGSN e.V. is to implement and promote standard methods for locating, identifying, and citing physical samples with confidence by operating an international IGSN registration service with a distributed infrastructure for use by and benefit to its members. Membership in the IGSN Implementation Organization is open to organizations who wish to run their own IGSN allocating service.

In this edition we spotlight Nichole Anest and the team at the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository. The Lamont-Doherty Core Repository (LDCR) contains one of the world’s most unique and important collections of scientific samples from the deep sea. Sediment cores from every major ocean and sea are archived at the Core Repository, which contains approximately 72,000 meters of core and associated metadata. Besides their mission to provide long-term curation and archiving of samples and cores, the Core Repository also fulfills sample requests, assists investigators in sample collection activities, and works tirelessly to educate teachers, students, and the public about the important role science and the Core Repository play in building a better understanding of Earth processes.  We caught up with Nichole to learn more about how the Core Repository uses the IGSN and SESAR² to manage their samples, and to explore some of their exciting sample collections. Read more below:

Why do you use SESAR²? We use SESAR² because it makes it possible to track samples through time and publications. I get many students requesting samples that someone used in a paper years to decades ago but the information in the paper about the samples is usually limited or non-existent. So, we have to go back through our paper sampling histories to locate the PI, what core(s) and at what intervals they sampled, and try to piece together what samples’ data were used for the published work. The use of IGSNs makes these sort of sample requests much easier as well as giving “automatic” acknowledgement to the repository where the samples came from.

Sample group highlight: There are about two hundred cores that were taken by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), part of the US Dept of the Interior, to look for near-shore sand deposits. They wanted to identify where beach sand was transported after major coastal storms (such as Irene and Sandy) and see if it is feasible to use it to replenish the beaches after such storms. Check out the BOEM cores in SESAR² which include core photos as well as grain size data.

The BOEM cores in the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository

SESAR Newsletter | February 2019

Nearly 7,000 holes drilled across the globe in collaboration with the Continental Scientific Drilling Coordination Office have been registered in SESAR. These holes now have persistent and globally unique identifiers (IGSNs) and can be linked to core samples extracted from the holes. Check them out in the SESAR² Catalog by searching Set Name/IGSN -> IGSN begins with “CDR”. These holes were registered as part of Open Core Data, an NSF-funded project that is radically improving discoverability, accessibility, citeability, preservation, and integration of data from past, current, and future drilling and coring projects.

Continental Scientific Drilling Holes Registered in SESAR

A recent EOS Meeting Report describes last year’s International Symposium on Linking Environmental Data and Samples, which gathered more than 70 participants from a variety of Earth and environmental disciplines such as the solid Earth sciences, marine science, oceanography, soil science, ecosystems science, biodiversity, and remote sensing. Researchers, including SESAR²’s Dr. Kerstin Lehnert, considered whether a uniform approach to data representation could be applied to disciplines and projects with widely varying approaches to sampling. Various sessions allowed attendees to discuss their motivations for linking samples and data, explore technical approaches to Web linking and identifiers, and evaluate the challenges in the adoption of common standards across different disciplines and sectors where incentives may vary widely. Participants agreed that relationships between samples, parts of samples, and sampling artifacts must be recorded to allow resulting observations to be related back to the world. Ultimately, the meeting achieved its theme of “linking” by bringing together multiple disciplines to improve our understanding of how linked data can work in practice for environmental samples and data.

Connecting Data and Real-World Samples

Join our Introducing SESAR "2.0" Webinar

We’re thrilled to announce that SESAR “2.0” and our new website are officially live. This release is the biggest update to SESAR since its 2004 founding, with new and improved functionality and UI.

Our new guide provides more information on how to use SESAR and documents our updated vocabularies and metadata schema. 

If you want to get familiar and practice registering samples, please use our sandbox. These samples will not be officially registered and can be used as your personal scratch space.

As part of our revamp, all users are now subscribed to a user listserv. We will be sending periodic emails to our users with system updates and notifications. 

Additionally, we have two webinar sessions to showcase these upgrades:

To sign up for the webinar, please fill out this form. Once you do, we will send a calendar invite. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at info@geosamples.org.

Thank you,
SESAR Team

Introducing SESAR "2.0" and Webinars Dates

If you run into any issues or have feedback, please reach out to info@geosamples.org. Be sure to join one of our webinar sessions Introducing SESAR "2.0" on October 8th and 9th!

MySESAR is now live!

The Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples (IMLGS) that has been developed and maintained by NOAA’s NCEI, has been decommissioned and will no longer be accessible on the NCEI web site starting May 5, 2025. In order to ensure continued access and updates to the IMLGS, SESAR and NCEI have agreed that SESAR will take over stewardship of this resource. SESAR staff is working with NCEI and the marine and lacustrine repository community to ensure persistence of this valuable resource. 

SESAR is planning a phased approach to continuing the services of the IMLGS: 

Phase Ia (completed December 1, 2025): Provide access to the current content of the IMLGS. SESAR will create a user interface for searching the current IMLGS and displaying search results. The priority is to make the contents of the IMLGS accessible again as quickly as possible and minimize downtime after the May 5 shutdown of NCEI-based Interactive Map Tool.

Phase Ib (completed February 10, 2026): SESAR has assumed management of the IMLGS Curators Listserv, previously hosted by NCEI. This listserv is an unmoderated forum for discussion and announcements related to the Curators group and Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples (IMLGS) database. To join the listserv, request to join here (log in to a Google email account first, or email info@geosamples.org to be manually added to the list): https://groups.google.com/a/geosamples.org/g/imlgs

Phase II (in progress, requires additional funding): Fully integrate the IMLGS services with SESAR. SESAR is starting to work with NCEI and contributing sample repositories to understand their needs and desires for a streamlined data ingest process and user needs for search. Based on these needs and desires, we will generate an implementation plan and try to identify sources of funding to perform the necessary technical developments.

Please note that much of the IMLGS data remains accessible also via GeoMapApp here.

We are grateful for the many notes of support we have received from the community reiterating the importance of the IMLGS resource and expressing gratitude to SESAR for helping to steward this resource in the future. We thank the community for your continued support and patience with this transition. 

If you have questions or comments, please reach out to us at info@geosamples.org.

sesar

Continental Scientific Drilling Holes Registered in SESAR

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