3rd NFDI4Earth Plenary 2024

This year is once again characterised by numerous consortium activities and related events – e. g. after a fruitful working meeting at the beginning of March at Frankfurt/M. and a successful performance at the EGU mid of April in Vienna, we would now like to cordially invite you to our 3rd NFDI4Earth Plenary taking place from 22 to 24 May 2024 again at Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden - Lingnerplatz 1.

We will start on Wednesday, 22 May 2024, early afternoon with various workshops and side events followed by different hands-on sessions and workshops as well as external impulses on Thursday and Friday. Further details on the Plenary, in particular the programme and schedule as well as the latest updates, can be found on the conference website, where you will also find information on organisational issues.

Participation is free of charge – please register for organisational purposes by 15 May 2024!

Now we’re looking forward to shortly welcoming you in Dresden, for interesting impulses, presentations, and workshops as well as fruitful discussions –  please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. 

The NFDI4Earth Coordination Office (TU Dresden)

Workshop on Terminologies in Earth System Sciences during the NFDI4Earth Plenary

How can terminologies increase the FAIRness of research outcome? What's the status quo of their usage in Earth System Science? Which Best Practices exist? And how can we learn from other domains? Within the scope of BITS and IG FAIRESST we are offering a workshop for discussing and answering these questions: 'Terminologies in Earth System Sciences - Can We Close the Gaps?' It will be held during the NFDI4Earth Plenary in Dresden, on 22 May 2024 and is divided into two parts. The first one is starting at 13:00 hrs focuses on 'State of the Art and Existing Applications', the second one deals with 'Gaps and Desired Applications' and starts at 15:30 hrs.  

Both workshops can be attended independently and are free of charge, coffee and biscuits will be served for good measure. Everyone interested in this topic is warmly invited to participate!  

For easier planning, please register in advance. 

BITS Project Team (DKRZ, TIB, Senckenberg)

HeFDI Code School Team, Dominik C. Hezel (Goethe Universität Frankfurt / M.)

This final call aims to support four research data management projects that showcase broad usability in the German Earth System Sciences (ESS) community. We're seeking innovative solutions addressing challenges in managing earth system research data beyond individual groups. Projects should be applicable across diverse ESS subdisciplines and ready for immediate implementation, ensuring practical and widely adoptable outcomes.

The official announcement and all details are available on our website.

Additionally, we're pleased to announce that this year's pilots will participate in the NFDI4Earth Plenary.

Stay tuned for more details, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact the pilot coordinator.

Kolja Nenoff (Universität Leipzig) 

The Living Handbook is now online and welcoming articles. Be among the first authors of the NFDI4Earth Living Handbook and submit your article today! DOI for your articles will be available soon!  

The NFDI4Earth Living Handbook provides (i) an encyclopaedia-style documentation for all aspects related to the NFDI4Earth, its services and outcomes in a human-readable form, and (ii) aims to structure and harmonise all information related to data management and data science approaches in the Earth System Sciences in a community-driven effort. The guidelines for articles and the editorial workflow are now published. Preparation of the layout is in its last stages as part of the OneStop4All design. It will be very different from the prototype, including the name of the authors and other additional information.

In the living handbook you can find at present more than 100 articles, Frequently asked questions, making the guidelines and already submitted articles openly available. 

We, the 'IG HPC in ESS' (for short) feel that methods for FAIR research data (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable – Wilkinson et al., 2016) are too seldom practiced in HPC. There are obstacles: If you produce 1PB of data, you will not be able to put that huge dataset into one of the common FAIR data repositories. Thus, HPC or Scientific Computing workflows and their results often lack reproducibility and interoperability. So, our IG is about a twist towards the FAIR principles in HPC. We are a mixed crowd from the Earth System Sciences, different computing centers and other contexts – most, but not all of us are NFDI4Earth participants. Take a look, write and join us!

We are proud of our first position paper, introducing two focus areas: "Metadata, Interoperability and Reproducibility", where we aim at proper metadata enrichment for HPC data – and "Federated access, Findability and Accessibility", where we advocate easy access to data storage and analysis facilities. Recently, we have initiated an exciting NFDI4Earth Pilot project, 'CAPICE', (see proposal in pdf), where we will implement an efficient and FAIR ice-sheet modelling workflow, evaluating approaches towards data publication from HPC centers. Stay tuned! 

IG HPC in ESS - Organisers: Stephan Frickenhaus (AWI Bremerhaven) &

Stephan Hachinger (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum Munich)

This year, the NFDI4Earth Consortium took the chance to present the current stage of its activities to a wider audience at the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) – one of the most prominent conference on Earth System Sciences in Europe, which took place from 15 to 19 April 2024 in Vienna, visited by almost 19,000 attendees.

On behalf of our community, we thought it is a hugely worthwhile opportunity to engage with many partners and initiatives by a lively programme of various talks and posters at different sessions co-organized by NFDI4Earth, focusing on the Research Data Management in Earth System Sciences, and featured by a booth during the EGU exhibition with many pulsating pitches.

It was a great event to showcase a wealth of NFDI4Earth’s services and tools: our User Support Network, Education and Training Portal, and the Knowledge Hub. National and international connectivity is also critical for NFDI4Earth – so we took the chance to present the overall NFDI, and related consortia, as FAIRagro and NFDI4Biodiversity, and to network with many initiatives and partners: CAMELS-DE, the Global Heatflow Database, and GeoRoc as well as the Open Geospatial Consortium, the European Plate Observing System, FAIR-EASE, FAIRCORE4EOSC, and DataTerra.

We would like to thank all our partners and supporters for a great week at EGU and hopefully see each other again in Vienna in 2025.

The NFDI4Earth Coordination Office (TU Dresden)

Image: DLR, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 

The Geoinformation Data, Processing and Applications International Conference 2024 focused on upcoming user needs related to all types of georeferenced data, the generation and processing of Earth observations and geodata and their applications. The Conference programme provided opportunities for networking and interactive exchange between users and producers of georeferenced data from different communities.

In a separate session, represenatives of the NFDI4Earth took the opportunity to address and discuss the digital needs of the Earth System Sciences Community, the challenges of our community-driven initiative to provide researchers with FAIR, coherent, and open data as well as innovative research data management and data science methods in front of GeoDPA attendees.

The NFDI4Earth Team

The first installment of the Spatial Data Science across Languages (SDSL) Workshop was successfully held in September 2023 at the Institute of Geoinformatics, University of Münster as a two-day event that brought together the Spatial Data Science community of research software developers, users, researchers and students.  

We are happy to announce that the second installment of the SDSL Workshop will take place again this year, on 18 - 19 September 2024 at the Geographical Institute of Charles University in Prague. The aim of the workshop is to bridge the language barrier existing between R, Python and Julia research software developers in the Spatial Data Science domain, and to bring these communities together to discuss their differences and commonalities, and find ways to cooperate and synchronise their efforts.

More information is available at the workshop homepage. 

Yomna Eid (Institute of Geoinformatics, University of Münster) & 

Martin Fleischmann (Geographical Institute of Charles University Prague)

The new integration between ORCID and GitHub make possible researchers to connect their ORCID iD with their GitHub profile. This will increase the visibility of the contributions to some of the most influential open source projects on GitHub, and make it easier for others to credit them for their work. 

The ORCID member organizations are now able to promote awareness of this new capability among their researchers. The initial integration allows GitHub users to link and display their ORCID iD on their GitHub profile, and a short instruction video can help researchers to set this new fetcher.  

Under a Memorandum of Understanding, ORCID and GitHub agree to dialogue and cooperation on several other interesting topics.

DataCite’s released the first public data file with metadata for over 52 million DOIs. The purpose of this new fetcher is to increase the discoverability and reusability of the research data, by easy retrieving of DataCite DOI metadata. Harvesting can be faster and easily achieved by DataCite metadata retrieval services — the DataCite REST API, OAI-PMH service, and GraphQL API.  

The Open Science Clusters' Action for Research and Society (OSCARS) announced the 1st Open Call for Open Science projects and services, open until 14 May 2024. The purpose of the Call is to support resear-chers in uptaking FAIR data analysis and providing a series of valuable scientific demonstrators, that impact the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). A total amount of ~16 million € will be distributed among the selected proposals with funding between 100,000 and 250,000 € for a period between 12 and 24 months.