Ecological Metadata Standard

http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/software/eml/

Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is a metadata specification developed by the ecology discipline and for the ecology discipline. It is based on prior work done by the Ecological Society of America and associated efforts (Michener et al., 1997, Ecological Applications). EML is implemented as a series of XML document types that can by used in a modular and extensible manner to document ecological data. Each EML module is designed to describe one logical part of the total metadata that should be included with any ecological dataset.

US/Canada Taxonomic Naming Standard

http://www.itis.usda.gov/

Welcome to ITIS, the Integrated Taxonomic Information System! Here you will find authoritative taxonomic information on plants, animals, fungi, and microbes of North America and the world. We are a partnership of U.S., Canadian, and Mexican agencies (ITIS-North America); other organizations; and taxonomic specialists. ITIS is also a partner of Species 2000 and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). The ITIS and Species 2000 Catalogue of Life (CoL) partnership is proud to provide the taxonomic backbone to the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL).

NOAA Guidelines for Establishing GPS-Derived Ellipsoid Heights

http://geodesy.noaa.gov/PUBS_LIB/NGS-58.html

The following guidelines were developed by the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) for performing Global Positioning System (GPS) surveys that are intended to achieve ellipsoid height network accuracies of 5 cm at the 95 percent confidence level, as well as ellipsoid height local accuracies of 2 cm and 5 cm, also at the 95 percent confidence level. See Appendix A for information about local and relative accuracies. These guidelines were developed in a partnership with Federal, state, and local government agencies, academia, and private surveyors and are the result of processing various test data sets and having extensive discussions with various GPS users groups.