The ambition of the NFDI4Earth is to further identify the demands for digital changes in the German Earth System Science community to establish a set of common principles, rules and standards for research data management in Earth System Science as well as experimental prototype platforms, operating on distributed resources, and to provide tools and mechanisms for data integration and analysis in a structured community consultation process.
NFDI4Earth addresses digital needs of researchers in Earth System Sciences (ESS). ESS comprise a sizeable number of disciplines and communities with the overarching aim to understand the functioning of all subsystems of the Earth system and their interactions. Pressing global challenges (e.g. climate change, water scarcity, land-use change, environmental pollution, natural hazards) call for intensifying national and international interdisciplinary efforts. Linkages between different subdisciplines and scientific approaches can be substantially strengthened through collaborative research data management (RDM) and knowledge extraction, ultimately leading to a new quality of science. A multitude of observations and model data in very high spatial, temporal and thematic resolutions leads to rapidly increasing data volumes. Thus, describing and assessing Earth system processes, their dependencies, and their changes urgently require workflows that are more efficient as well as more powerful data analytics frameworks. Today, various services to support RDM in ESS exist. However, they are scattered and heterogeneous as well as mostly project based. Consequently, they are lacking long-term perspectives.
NFDI4Earth will enable cutting-edge research in Earth System Science (ESS) and beyond. NFDI4Earth targets the consolidation and harmonization of research data related services in ESS, in order to offer a user-driven, innovation-friendly as well as efficient and sustainable service environment to researchers. Major objectives of NFDI4Earth are
Active and continuously committed ESS stakeholders from the NFDI4Earth community and develop FAIR and Open RDM capacities in the German ESS in a community driven process.
Enable students, scientists, lecturers, infrastructure providers and other professionals in ESS to feed and utilize an open and sustainable research data life cycle and facilitate a cultural change towards a FAIR and collaborative RDM and open and reproducible ESS.
Establish a set of common principles, rules, standards and guidance for ESS researchers and as a qualification framework for NFDI4Earth research data, services, and infrastructures.
Consolidate research data services in ESS and develop long-term perspective and strategy.
Scrutinize the potential of existing and novel solutions (machine learning, interactive computations, model-data integration, and visual analytics) in a sandbox approach, continuously improving data-driven ESS research processes, to advance NFDI4Earth towards a collaborative environment for data analytics
Contribute strongly and coherently to the overall development of the NFDI and ESS-related RDM in Germany, crosslink and interact with other NFDI consortia and develop a sustainable long-term operation model for NDFI4Earth embedded in the NFDI.
Showcase examples of best practices on innovative data science approaches and tools in support of interdisciplinary research
Establish NFDI4Earth as an integral part of international research data infrastructures and get at the forefront within international ESS RDM developments.