The development of the NFDI4Earth is driven by the researchers’ needs and requirements for research data management according to the FAIR principles. NFDI4Earth uses Earth System Science Pilots to engage the community. These Pilots stem from different domains of the ESS community, do manifest the researchers’ needs and are the community’s contribution to an agile development of the NFDI4Earth. 

Pilots do typically run for one year and are evaluated against a set of pre-defined criteria. 
Once NFDI4Earth is funded by DFG annual calls for pilots will be launched. 

If you are interested to apply for a pilot and have any questions please send an e-mail to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The next call for pilots is planned for 2022.

Pilots 2020

NFDI4Earth starts with running 14 Pilots, which are collected from an open call and reviewed in an open process. The NFDI4Earth co-applicants evaluated 38 proposals according to the following equally weighted criteria, scored on a 5 points scale for each criterion:

• –
  Quality and Innovation (relevance beyond state-of-the-art) 
• –
  Feasibility (leveraging existing technologies) 
• –
  Potential for engaging a broad user community (also potential for linking scientific users and information infrastructures) 
• –
  Potential for integration into the NFDI4Earth (relevance to the NFDI4Earth as whole e.g. in terms of contributing to a measure like education, interoperability, archiving, and clearly addressing relevant aspects of the research data life cycle).

Read the guidelines

All pilots refer to the research data life cycle. The diagram above shows the  focused phase(s).   

The pilots propose heterogeneous results including metadata, data, source code / software and documentations / publications.

The pilots were proposed by different members of the German ESS community. The map above shows the number of proposoals for each state.

The pilots cover all ESS related DFG topics as shown in the diagram above.

All pilot proposals describe concepts including the FAIR principles. The diagram above shows the focused principle(s).