Creating ENVRI-hub, the Open-Access Platform of the Environmental Sciences Community in Europe

Environmental research infrastructures designed for monitoring all domains of the Earth system (oceans, atmosphere, ecosystems, and solid earth) contribute to global observing systems and serve as crucial information sources for environmental scientists in their quest for understanding and interpreting the complex Earth System. The EU funded ENVRI-FAIR project builds on the Environmental Research Infrastructure (ENVRI) community that includes principal European producers and providers of environmental research data and services. The backbone of the project is the existing IT infrastructure of participating research infrastructures. ENVRI-FAIR targets the development and implementation of both technical frameworks and policy solutions that make scientific boundaries seamlessly traversable for environmental scientists and prepare a holistic approach to Earth system science for the new Open Science paradigm. Cross-discipline harmonization and standardization activities, together with the implementation of joint data management and access structures at the research infrastructure level, facilitate the strategic coordination of observation systems, required for interdisciplinary science. ENVRI-FAIR will create the open access ENVRI-hub delivering environmental and earth science services provided by the contributing environmental research infrastructures. The architecture and functionalities of the ENVRI-hub are driven by the applications, use cases and user needs, and will be based on three main pillars: (1) the ENVRI Knowledge Base and Training Platform as resources for knowledge, services, training, and other digital assets; (2) the ENVRI Catalogue as machine-actionable interface to the ENVRI ecosystem; and (3) interdisciplinary use cases as demonstrators for the capabilities of service provision among environmental research infrastructures and across science clusters. The architecture, design features, technology developments and associated policies are designed in anticipation of interoperation with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The ENVRI-hub is intended to act as a key platform for researchers, other users and developers planning to include ENVRI data-services in their workflows through EOSC resources.