ScienceBase communities include members representing the USGS and partner agencies engaged in scientific endeavors that require a centralized data management platform, providing methods to catalog, manage, and share information resources. Communities are assigned a space within the ScienceBase Catalog and are required to have designated community managers, including at least one USGS employee that will also serve as a point of contact for the community.
Scientific projects can use ScienceBase to document and share datasets, citations and manuscripts, and track project activities. Communities may selectively restrict preliminary or sensitive records from public view, and control permissions for individual items or groups of items. Communities may construct saved searches, known as collections of items, to generate groupings of specific items, which may be segregated using filters (tags, locations, contacts, dates, etc.) Communities may organize records to deliver cataloged information to other applications via web services. For example, USGS National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center is delivering project information cataloged in ScienceBase to the NCCWSC Project web pages.