NASA's Pilot Land Data System (PLDS) was a prototype distributed information management system designed to support NASA's land-science community. The functions of PLDS have now been transferred to the ORNL DAAC, the U.S. Geological Survey's Earth Resources Observation System (EROS) Data Center (EDC) Land Processes DAAC, and the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) DAAC.

The PLDS provided a range of services including:

• On-line information system
• Science project support
• Browse facility for analog data
• Publication of data on CD-ROMs
• Documentation of data sets
• User assistance
• Distribution of and tracking of data

There were three PLDS sites: one at the Ames Research Center in California; another at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland; and the third at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The scientific and related descriptive information managed by PLDS came from numerous sources. These include four NASA land-science projects -- the First ISLSCP Field Experiment (FIFE), the Inter-Disciplinary Sciences - Land Surface Climatology (IDS-LSC) project, the Sedimentary Basins Project (SBP), and the Oregon Transect Ecosystem Research Project (OTTER) -- along with several other data processing facilities, individual scientists, and data systems.

PLDS transferred the FIFE and OTTER data sets to the ORNL DAAC for archiving and distribution. These data sets are no longer available through PLDS.