Towards a Specialized Environmental Data Portal: Challenges and Opportunities

EnviDat – www.envidat.ch – is the institutional Environmental Data portal of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL. Launched in 2012 as a small project to explore possible solutions for a generic WSL-wide data portal, it has since evolved into a strategic initiative at the institutional level tackling issues in the broad areas of Open Research Data and Research Data Management. EnviDat demonstrates our commitment to accessible research data in order to advance environmental science.

EnviDat actively implements the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) principles. Core EnviDat research data management services include the registration, integration and hosting of quality-controlled, publication-ready data from a wide range of terrestrial environmental systems, in order to provide unified access to WSL’s environmental monitoring and research data. The registration of research data in EnviDat results in the formal publication with permanent identifiers (EnviDat own PIDs as well as DOIs) and the assignment of appropriate citation information.

Innovative EnviDat features that contribute to the global system of modern documentation and exchange of scientific information include: (i) a DataCRediT mechanism designed for specifying data authorship (Collection, Validation, Curation, Software, Publication, Supervision), (ii) the ability to enhance published research data with additional resources, such as model codes and software, (iii) in-depth documentation of data provenance, e.g., through a dataset description as well as related publications and datasets, (iv) unambiguous and persistent identifiers for authors (ORCIDs) and, in the medium-term, (v) a decentralized “peer-review” data publication process for safeguarding the quality of available datasets in EnviDat.

More recently, the EnviDat development has been moving beyond the set of core features expected from a research data management portal with a built-in publishing repository. This evolution is driven by the diverse set of researchers’ requirements for a specialized environmental data portal that formally cuts across the five WSL research themes forest, landscape, biodiversity, natural hazards, and snow and ice, and that concerns all research units and central IT services.

Examples of such recent requirements for EnviDat include: (i) immediate access to data collected by automatic measurements stations, (ii) metadata and data visualization on charts and maps, with geoservices for large geodatasets, and (iii) progress towards linked open data (LOD) with curated vocabularies and semantics for the environmental domain.

There are many challenges associated with the developments mentioned above. However, they also represent opportunities for further improving the exchange of scientific information in the environmental domain. Especially geospatial technologies have the potential to become a central element for any specialized environmental data portal, triggering the convergence between publishing repositories and geoportals. Ultimately, these new requirements demonstrate the raised expectations that institutions and researchers have towards the future capabilities of research data portals and repositories in the environmental domain. With EnviDat, we are ready to take up these challenges over the years to come.