Core concepts
Background reading on how Erde structures environmental data. These pages explain the building blocks — the Sites, Projects, and records you work with — and the rules that hold them together, so the task guides in later sections make sense. Read them once before you start entering data; come back to them when a term or behavior is unclear.
Erde organizes data along two scopes. A Site is a physical place under management; a Project is a unit of work. Every domain record lives under one or both, and most records are grouped into an aggregate — a parent record with its children — that Erde validates, locks, and audits as a unit.
In this section
- The Erde data model — the full record hierarchy, from Site down to Lab Result, with an entity-relationship diagram of how the pieces connect.
- Sites and Projects — the two scoping axes: spatial scope (Site) versus work scope (Project), how a Project spans many Sites, and where Programs fit.
- Aggregates, locking, and auditing — how Erde groups related records, freezes them with Site and Project locks, and tracks every change for the audit trail.
- Users, roles, and permissions — the conceptual model for who can do what: global roles plus per-Site and per-Project access. Full administration detail lives in Administration.
- Codes and names — why a record's Code is its unique identifier and its Name is a display label, the characters a Code allows, and how reference data inverts the rule.
- Reference data — the shared catalogs every record draws on: Analytes, Methods, units, Matrices, and the other lookups.
- Documents — attach files to Sites, Projects, Locations, Samples, and Lab Reports, classified by what they relate to and an optional category, with an in-browser viewer.
Start with The Erde data model for the big picture, then read Sites and Projects. Those two cover most of the vocabulary you meet on every screen.