Justin Richardson attended the“Mapping a Future for Management of Low-Temperature Geochemical Data” to be held February 18-20, 2020. The Workshop, led by, Deb Agarwal of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Tao Wen of Syracuse University, and Jeff Catalano of Washington University), aimed to start moving towards a solution for the data culture in Low Temperature Geochemistry.

Many geochemists do not make data available to other researchers. It is not that researchers do not want to work together, but the community does not have a overall practice of how to make data available for other people to synthesize into larger conclusions about the Earth.

The workshopwas been funded by the Geobiology and Low-Temperature Geochemistry Program at NSF and Justin was lucky enough to be one of the invited members of the community to discuss a path forward for managing geochemical data. Participants discuss intensively for two days ideas that would lead to i) better understanding of what our community needs to do for geochemical data; ii) a community white paper; and iii) a publication to describe our ideas.