Issue 10, November 2025

Newsletter‍

NFDI4Earth Chatbot: Smart Access to Earth System Knowledge

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NFDI4Earth's new chatbot enables natural language access to Earth science-specific knowledge. Based on established Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) concepts, it extends the NFDI4Earth OneStop4All with an interactive query interface. The technical implementation combines modern language models provided by ScaDS.AI with a vector database for semantic document storage. This approach allows efficient indexing of GitLab-hosted markdown documents and provides context-aware responses through semantic search capabilities.  

Questions submitted through OneStop4All trigger a multi-step process: The query processor analyses user questions and searches ChromaDB for relevant content. This vector store, pre-loaded with indexed content from the NFDI4Earth Living Handbook, identifies the most relevant articles. By merging this content with the original question, the system produces an enriched prompt for the ScaDS.AI API for large language models (LLM), ensuring precise responses grounded in documentation. Implemented as a Python library with REST endpoints, the system integrates seamlessly into the OneStop4All. 

Usage metrics and interaction patterns will help us continuously improve both the chatbot's performance and the Living Handbook's content structure, ensuring the system evolves with our community's needs. Try out the beta version through OneStop4All and explore our technical documentation for implementation details and API examples. 

Ralf Klammer (TU Dresden, CIDS/ZIH) Auriol Degbelo (TU Dresden, Chair of Geoinformatics)

& Jan Frenzel (TU Dresden, ScaDS.AI) 

NFDI4Earth Label is live 

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Register and assess your repository to receive the NFDI4Earth Label for research data repositories in the Earth System Sciences. If you are a repository representative, this is your opportunity to take the next step towards FAIR data practices!

The goal of the NFDI4Earth Label is to improve transparency, trust, and usability by assessing how repositories align with shared community standards. The application process combines an automated analysis of the re3data entry of a repository with a short questionnaire, which is filled out by repository representatives. While the metadata analysis highlights technical aspects, such as identifiers and interfaces, the questionnaire provides additional information on organisational practices, including backup routines, archiving strategies, and funding.  

Repositories that meet the requirements receive the NFDI4Earth Label badge, indicating reliability and a commitment to the FAIR data principles. The successful reception of the badge is documented in the repository metadata in the NFDI4Earth Knowledge Hub. The badge appears on the repository's entry in the NFDI4Earth OneStop4All portal and can also be added to the repository’s own website.  

Robert Brylka (Senckenberg Frankfurt/M.) representing the NFDI4Earth Label Team

Hochschule Bochum signs NFDI4Earth Commitment 

NFDI4Earth co-applicants, Bochum University of Applied Sciences and the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences (see section News from the RDM & Earth System Science Community) became the latest institutional signatories of the NFDI4Earth FAIRness and Openness Commitment.

Bochum University of Applied Sciences is a public university in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, specialising in technology, economics, and health. Its 8,200 students are enrolled in over 70 degree programs. The university emphasises practice-oriented education, interdisciplinary research, sustainability, and close ties with the regional economy and health sectors. HS Bochum is active in EduTrain, the training and education component of NFDI4Earth, EduTrain, other educational networks such as ORCA.nrw (Open Resources Campus NRW). These activities help to familiarise researchers and students with tools and services for research data management, to create robust training programs, and to produce educational materials that promote FAIR and open accessibility of research results. Contact: Alexandra Lindner

The commitment now has 12 institutions or organisations and 63 individuals as signatories, who pledge their support for NFDI4Earth's mission and to adopt the NFDI4Earth Commitment into their practice of research data management. In the coming months, the NFDI4Earth Commitment team plans to release advice on using the Commitment as a conversation starter - stay tuned.

Daniel Nüst (TU Dresden) 

NFDI4Earth Outcomes‍

Joint Plenary NFDI4Earth meets NFDI4Biodiversity group picture. Photo credit: Shanice Allerheiligen

The first joint NFDI4Earth and NFDI4Biodiversity Plenary Meeting, held at MARUM in Bremen from 22 to 24 September 2025, brought together researchers, data experts, and stakeholders to advance collaborative and innovative solutions for research data management in Earth system sciences and biodiversity.  

After a kick-off with NFDI4Earth spokesperson Lars Bernard, looking at our status and achievements, the projects outcomes were made tangible in a session on selected past and current NFDI4Earth Pilots and projects from the NFDI4Earth Incubator Lab. These projects showed the diversity of ways to approach more FAIR and Open research data: from R packages and dashboards to AI-based data labelling for drone data, from letting AI understand thematic maps to harmonising models that study the land-athmosphere system. 

Check out the projects and their contributions: EarthLinks, GeoFRESH 3 and here, GeoLabel/DeadTrees, VISQAM, FAIR RDM for L-A Feedback Research.  

The NFDI4Earth Plenary 2025 featured a number of workshops to connect developers and users of the products and services of NFDI4Earth and its members, as well as advancing the research agenda and building the RDM infrastructure of the future

The workshops topics: 

🧑‍🎓 Education and training in NFDI4Earth – Insights into learning pathways, the OER life cycle, institutional uptake, and certification  

⏱️ Reference and benchmarking data – towards creating and providing relevant data for the community 

🗺️ From Data to Interactive Maps: Visualization Workflows with Geospatial Data from PANGAEA 

🤖 Quality time: Rethinking Data Trust in the Age of AI and (Cross-Domain) Collaboration 

🏷️ Label and 💪 Commitment – Joint efforts towards FAIR and Open services and practices 

💽 Metadata – Towards common recommendations and schema crosswalks across Earth and Environmental Consortia   

🏁 Strategy Earth System Sciences 

🗣️ LLM4RDM: Large Language Models meet the Research Data Lifecycle 

The first day of the NFDI4Earth Plenary 2025 ended with a fun "academic speed dating" session organised by our NFDI4Earth Academy team. The participants thank each other for the interesting conversations and new connections across disciplines, institutions, and career stages. Learn more about the other activities of our academy. 

Lilli Freda, executive director of EPOS at Joint Plenary NFDI4Earth meets NFDI4Biodiversity

Daniele Bailo, IT officer of EPOS at Joint Plenary NFDI4Earth meets NFDI4Biodiversity.

Photo credits: Shanice Allerheiligen‍

The second of the NFDI4Earth Plenary 2025 started with two keynotes. Lilli Freda, executive director, and Daniele Bailo, IT officer, from the European Plate Observation System (EPOS), presented how the European research infrastructure for solid Earth science helps to move from fragmented, heterogeneous data to open, integrated and multidisciplinary research, and to realise the ambition that data are used to their full effect. Read their own perspective in the International News section below! 

Wolfgang zu Castell (below left) from GFZ presents on the Helmholtz DataHub, a collaborative effort for an infrastructure for the full research cycle by Helmholtz centres of the research field Earth and Environment. The DataHub connects data from different places and communities, with different research cultures. 

Wolfgang zu Castell (GFZ), Lars Bernard (TUD), Frank Oliver Glöckner (AWI) and Wim Hugo (DANS)

at Joint Plenary NFDI4Earth meets NFDI4Biodiversity. Photo cr‍edits: Shanice Allerheiligen‍

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The joint plenary by NFDI4Biodiversity and NFDI4Earth was kicked-off by the spokespersons Lars Bernard and Frank Oliver Glöckner, who briefly reminisce about the now long past days of writing the first project proposals before we turn to today: envisioning a OneNFDI with close collaborations between the consortia. The crucial societal challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss have to be tackled together, just as the sustainability of the NFDI consortia and their services.

The event continued with more highlights: keynote, posters, softwares, and a bar camp!

Wim Hugo from DANS, the Dutch national centre of expertise and repository for research data delivered the keynote "Two Decades of Research Data Infrastructure". He took us on a journey through past steps, big trends, and challenges in research data publication/management/curation, sharing his wealth of experiences and providing commentary, perspective, and inspiration.

The Plenary continued with the poster session connecting the two communities on diverce topics and finished with a shared conference dinner.

The second joint day began with the software & tools marketplace. The presented new and further developments to existing tools enable FAIR and next-level research data management practices.

The final day continued with two Bar Camp style sessions on diverse topics contributed by the participants. The topics were pitched to the group, and then magically ✨ turned into a programme. Thanks to this innovative section of the programme, everyone had the opportunity to share their work, pose questions, and get new inputs from members of both consortia.

Take a look at the details and photos from the event on our Mastodon and LinkedIn pages.

Mark your calendars today an save the date: the NFDI4Earth Plenary 2026 will take place 27 to 29 May in Dresden.

Daniel Nüst (TU Dresden)

NFDI4Earth Helpdesk: Question of the Quarter

The User Support Network Helpdesk answers the questions we get in the internal ticket system. To give you an impression of our work, we will regularly present some of our tasks here.    

The user support network (USN) recently included the NFDI4Earth Label group into their support infrastructure. 

As GEOMAR is coordinating the USN and is also hosting a repository,  Hela did start to register the GEOMAR OceanRep repository  via the NFDI4Earth Label process and carried out the assessments. So this time GEOMAR was a customer of the USN.    

Topic: NFDI4Earth Label for OceanRep: Request to Become Repository Representative   

Handling:  Hela as the GEOMAR Repository Representative got the permission to work on the assessment and started with the first assessment, which uses the well established re3data registry, where the GEOMAR repository was already listed in 2015. Then Hela went on with the self assessment. Mostly she could refer to our information and policies available on the OCeanRep repository website. Robert was reviewing the assessment for completeness and answered occuring questions. So after only two days the GEOMAR OceanRep got the label awarded and it is now displayed on its starting page.    

Feedback: The process was well organized - GEOMAR was happy to be awarded the NFDI4Earth Label.

   
Hela Mehrtens (GEOMAR Kiel), Robert Brylka (Senckenberg Frankfurt/M.)

NFDI4Earth at the Data Science Symposium in Geesthacht 

Marie Ryan, Sibylle Hassler & Ivonne Anders at NFDI4Earth booth. Photo cr‍edit: Marie Ryan (HEREON)

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The 10th Data Science Symposium (DSS) was held on the 3 and 4 of September 2026 at Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon in Geesthacht, near Hamburg. Established in 2017, the DSS has been organized collaboratively by AWI, GEOMAR, and Hereon with the aim of strengthening integration across scientific methodologies, practical applications, and infrastructure advancement.

This year, NFDI4Earth was well represented with nine partners from consortium and a booth, offering information, exchanges and some nice goodies for any interested participants of the symposium. At the booth, visitors had the opportunity to explore the OneStop4All portal and were invited to provide feedback, to undertake a short survey, or to simply ask us any questions they had with regard to NFDI4Earth and its activities, events and especially products which many took advantage of with great interest.

Marie Ryan (HEREON Geesthacht)

Participate in NFDI4Earth

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OneStop4All feedback collection

The OneStop4All feedback team is currently in the process of gathering feedback on the portal from a wide variety of users and we would like your input! To date, four dedicated workshops have been held, two in KIT, one in DKRZ and one in TUD, where participants had the opportunity to explore the portal, undertake specific tasks and provide feedback on their personal experiences and give suggestions for improvement. Alongside these workshops, the OneStop4All was also presented at conferences, such as the European Geoscience Union General Assembly (EGU), an NFDI4Earth Academy Coffee Lecture, and the Data Science Symposium, where we encouraged feedback from the conference participants. 

The feedback process has four steps: 1) Users submit feedback via a ticket system, which the implementation team reviews for action; 2) feedback is transferred to a Git project for documentation and processing; 3) feedback is sorted into categories like Functionality, Content/Metadata, Usability/Compatibility, Technical aspects, and Accessibility; 4) A summary is created to highlight key areas for improvement. 

The chart above shows the distribution of feedback up to date, according to the categories from step 3. As of September 2025, we have received 50 feedback tickets with the main feedback being on search and filters. 

You are also invited to provide your feedback! Just visit the OneStop4All and add your feedback through the link at the top of the screen. We are looking forward to your much appreciated comments and suggestions.

Marie Ryan (HEREON Geesthacht), Ivonne Anders (DKRZ Hamburg) & Sibylle Hassler (KIT Karlsruhe)

News from the RDM & Earth System Science Community

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NFDI4Earth @ CoRDI 2025  

Several members of the NFDI4Earth team at CoRDI 2025. Photo cr‍edit: Daniel Nüst (TU Dresden)

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In August 2025, the second Conference on Research Data Infrastructures – CoRDI 2025 – took place at RWTH Aachen University. A broad programme with keynotes, lectures, poster sessions and a market of opportunities took place in the lecture hall centre C.A.R.L.. The conference is build primarly on contributions from the NFDI community, but broadens its scope and participants from special information services (Fachinformationsdienste, FIDs), RDM service providers, and software communities and projects, which helped to make it a diverse and interesting event.

Members of the NFDI4Earth community participated in over ten contributions the programme, in addition to the official NFDI4Earth poster at the market of consortia, which served as a gathering point throughout the days of the event: our helpdesk was presented as part of a cross-disciplinary user support network and the Geo-Chem-Life science helpdesk cluster, the NFDI4Earth Commitment team shared new insights on growing cultural change, NFDI4Earth partner LRZ contributed to a submission on supercomputing centres, the NFDI4Earth academy team reported on their joint efforts to offer law and ethics training to researchers, our development team presented joint work on harmonisation of repository metadata, and the long-term archival measure was included in a contribution on digital preservation in the NFDI.

Find out more about the topics in the conference proceedings published on Zenodo.  

Daniel Nüst (TU Dresden)

20 years of Open Science at the GFZ Potsdam

Cr‍edit: Valentina Protopopova-Kakar (GFZ)

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The GFZ Helmholtz Center for Geosciences prioritizes Open Science (OS) at all stages of the scientific process, as OS emphasizes transparency and reproducibility in science and foster knowledge creation through sharing of data, software, methods, teaching materials and discoveries. Over the past two decades, the GFZ have taken various OS steps to achieve greater transparency and openness in the scientific process.

In 2003, Helmholtz Association signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, the starting point for the community's OS activities. The GFZ was among the first organizations to adopt Open Access, Open Research Data, and Open Research Software publishing. In 2005, the Helmholtz Open Science Office was established to support the Association’s research centers in adopting OS principles. The GFZ Library, today the Library of the Science Park Albert Einstein, was among the first digital libraries in the field of geoscience, committed to Open Access publishing, and played a leading role in the Helmholtz Open Science Office until 2021. Currently, the Working group Open Science, chaired by Prof. Dr Wolfgang zu Castell (Director of Department “Geoinformation” and CEO at GFZ), is dedicated to the development of Helmholtz Quality Indicators for Data and Software Products, documentation practices and licensing of research software, as well as measures to support the open access transformation.

Since 2006, GFZ assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) to datasets, archived by and published through GFZ Data Services and cover all geoscientific disciplines. Part of the service portfolio are also assigning DOIs to software, scripts or codes, and offering International Generic Sample Number (IGSN) registration for unambiguous identification of physical samples and collections, as a founding member of IGSN e.V. GFZ coordinates the Specialized Information Service for Geosciences (FID Geo), offering consulting services since 2016, in open publication of research data and texts. The Helmholtz DataHub was established as a collaborative, distributed digital infrastructure within the Helmholtz Research Field Earth and Environment, beginning in 2019, to promote FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) research data management and to provide a unified, interoperable infrastructure under the Earth Data Portal. In the meantime, the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration was launched to address the topic of metadata and increase the connectivity across the Helmholtz distributed research data ecosystem. The GFZ team is strongly involved in all Helmholtz activities and the NFDI cross-consortia initiative Research Software Marketplace (nfdi.software).

At the end of October 2024, the GFZ joined the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) for implementation of responsible research assessment at research organizations. On March 3, 2025, the GFZ Department “Geoinformation” organized the first Open Science Day at the GFZ. And at the end of July 2025, the GFZ supported the efforts of NFDI4Earth at the national level to engage more research organizations and researchers in internationally recognized OS practices by signing the NFDI4Earth Fairness and Openness Commitment. GFZ researchers Kirsten Elger and Melanie Lorenz contributed to the development of the NFDI4Earth Commitment.

Department Geoinformation (GFZ Potsdam) 

International News

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Towards a federated Future for Geoscience Data: EPOS meets NFDI4Earth 

I am really excited for this space and opportunity to introduce the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) to the NFDI4Earth community. EPOS is Europe’s unique research infrastructure for solid Earth science, created to provide open and seamless access to data, services, and tools across disciplines and countries. By integrating resources from more than 500 providers and 26 countries, EPOS enables scientists to better understand how the Earth works, and transform this knowledge into solutions in strategic fields such as the prevention and mitigation of natural and anthropogenic hazards, clean energy and the responsible stewardship of georesources. 

Our journey started at the end of the nineties, by bringing together scientists from different solid Earth science domains, IT experts, and decision makers to build one research infrastructure that would overcome fragmentation and make multidisciplinary geoscience data available to everyone, learning each other’s language and sharing skills in the process. 

At the heart of EPOS lie two elements: this multi-faceted community and our open platform, a federated system that connects national and international research infrastructures and makes multidisciplinary data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. 

It was a pleasure to be in Bremen last September at the NFDI Joint Plenary and to find the same spirit of openness and collaboration. Infrastructure such as NFDI4Earth plays a pivotal role in engaging national data providers and leveraging their knowledge of local contexts: building this partnership will help link German excellence with the European and global context. 

Looking ahead, we intend to advance the discussion initiated in Bremen with the NFDI4Earth representatives in the occasion of the EPOS Days 2026, taking place in Cagliari, Sardinia, in March 2026. As our annual community gathering, it offers the ideal setting to connect, discover what EPOS has to offer, and turn our dialogue into concrete collaboration.

Lilli Freda (Executive Director, EPOS)

EGU26 Abstract Submission

is Open‍‍

The EGU General Assembly 2026 (3 - 8 May, Vienna), will bring together geoscientists from all over the world for a conference that so far covers all disciplines of Earth, Planetary and Space sciences. The aim is to offer scientists, and especially young scientists, a forum to present their work, to discuss ideas with experts from all areas of Earth System Sciences and learn that Science lives on the open exchange of knowledge. 

The NFDI4Earth would like to invite you to several session that aim to promote a Sustainable Open Science, make the results of scientific work publicly available to science, industry and society, as well as in the data century, to promote best practices for research data management following the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principals.

We will be happy if you consider to submit an abstract (between 22 October 2025 and 15 January 2026, 13:00 CET) or simply attend one of the the following NFDI4Earth or ESS related sessions:

·        SC2.19: Discover data, repositories and learning materials - advance your research by using open ESS services 

·      ESSI2.6: Shaping the European landscape for Earth System Science – Making transnational  data use of research infrastructures 

·      ESSI2.7: Workflow approaches enabling scalable and reproducible state-of-the-art computation and data analysis in Earth System Sciences 

·      ESSI3.1: Open Science Enterprise: A Blueprint for Collaborative Platforms 

·      ESSI3.3: Research data infrastructures in Earth System Sciences: Bridging the gap between user needs and sustainable software solutions; linking approaches across disciplines and domains 

·      ESSI4.2: From Data Silos to Data Spaces: How FAIR Digital Objects Transform Research 

·      ESSI4.6: Modern Earth system science visualization and exploration techniques - the balancing act between complex information, broad functionality and simple illustration

·      ESSI5.1: Open Session for Earth and Space Science Informatics 

·      ITS1.19/AS4.8 Advancing Environmental sciences with Innovation and Research Infrastructures

·      ITS1.20/ESSI4.3: Essential Variables for Global Cooperation and Interoperability 

·      ITS1.21/ESSI4.5: Inter- and Transdisciplinary Studies of the Geosphere: experiences, challenges and new perspectives worldwide

Valentina Protopopova-Kakar (GFZ Postdam) 

The NFDI4Earth project has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the project NFDI4Earth (DFG project no. 460036893, https://nfdi4earth.de/) within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI, https://www.nfdi.de/).‍

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NFDI Consortium Earth System Sciences | https://nfdi4earth.de

edited by:  Valentina Protopopova-Kakar (GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences) & NFDI4Earth Coordination Office (TUD Dresden University of Technology)

Report news to: nfdi4earth-news@tu-dresden.de