Illinois Data Bank

You are ready to deposit data if:

  • your data is in a final state and not expected to undergo revisions.
  • you have removed any private, confidential, or other legally protected information from your data.
  • you are a faculty member, staff member, or graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
  • you have permission to publicly distribute data from all creator(s) and/or copyright owner(s).

Published data:

  • is open to anyone in the world.
  • receives a stable identifier (DOI) for easy reference and citation.
  • is readily available for anyone to access for a minimum of 5 years.
  • is located in a stable environment that complies with many funder and publisher requirements.

Researcher Spotlight

featured researcher photo
Yushu Xia Yushu Xia is a Lamont Assistant Research Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. She completed her Ph.D. with Professor Michelle Wander at UIUC. Her research lab utilizes field, lab, and remote sensing datasets along with modeling tools to monitor soil health, carbon sequestration, greenhouse gas emissions, and ecosystem productivity. Her finer-scale research aims to help farmers improve precision agriculture, while her broader-scale research aims to benefit policymaking by improving the accuracy and reducing the uncertainty of estimates associated with ecosystem services.
What do you see as the primary benefit to you of archiving your data in a repository?
I have always believed in the concept of open research, and I strive to make all the datasets and modeling tools generated from my research to be publicly available. To achieve better confidence in adopting improved soil management as a natural climate solution, we need to improve the quantification of various soil ecosystem service outcomes under different climate and management scenarios using modeling tools. However, models can never be accurate enough without using on-the-ground datasets for calibration and validation. Open datasets can help alleviate the data gaps that the soil modeling community is faced with.

See all researcher spotlights