MetacatUI

Lauren -- I think the key is to make the various plugins aware that a change occurred. In Zotero, this can be done with a custom site translator. There's a bit of information online in the Zotero forums, and I found this particularly helpful:

My code tells Zotero to listen for two custom events -- bibdatachanging and bibdatachanged. The former calls Zotero_Browser.contentHide(), and the latter 
calls Zotero_Browser.contentLoad().  I just fire one manually before I refresh my result div and the other after, and Zotero becomes aware of the new data just fine.

See: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3173/fire-zotero-action-on-ajax-action?page=1#Item_8
And: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/translators

I also found this page, which explicitly shows how to tell Zotero that page has changed: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/exposing_metadata#force_zotero_to_refresh_metadata

Websites for which metadata changes without a page reload should fire a ZoteroItemUpdated event to tell Zotero to re-detect metadata on the page. This is supported in Zotero 3.0 and later.

var ev = document.createEvent('HTMLEvents');
ev.initEvent('ZoteroItemUpdated', true, true);
document.dispatchEvent(ev);