Sun feels that she cannot easily share her own data for fear of disclosing sensitive information because of the work location and the fact that she works on endangered species. Even an embargoed dataset could be problematic, as tortoises keep the same home range and the lifespan of a tortoise vastly exceeds the duration of any reasonable embargo. However, she might be able to share derivative datasets, if these could be easily created, or a subset of less sensitive data, such as life history, demographic or behavioural data (e.g., home range size, daily and seasonal activity, diet, social biology or thermo-regulatory behaviour).
DataONE might also be useful in improving Sun’s overall data management capabilities, e.g., educating her on best practices for data quality and metadata development. If DataONE provided tools for cataloguing and managing locally-stored data, these could be very useful. She might be willing to deposit data at a member node for limited sharing, preservation and for ensuring long-term preservation of data (e.g., migration of data formats), though only if its privacy can be assured and doing so were as easy as (or at least, not much harder than) maintaining local backups.
Sun is interested in finding additional data that correspond to the location of tortoise populations, and additional tortoise data so she can put her current study into perspective and perhaps find collaborators. For example, data on invasive species in the area she studies could help explain changes observed in the populations. She does not have much technical support, so she need the tools to be easy to use. Given that her research is motivated by both scientific interests and policy concerns, she is extremely wary of using data of unknown origin or quality, so discoverability and validation of datasets are key issues.