The ENVRI-Hub as a service for accelerating FAIRification of the Environment Domain Research Infrastructures

European Environmental Research Infrastructures (ENVRIs) on the ESFRI level are core facilities for providing data, research products and services from the four subdomains of Earth system science – Atmosphere, Marine, Solid Earth, and Biodiversity/Terrestrial Ecosystems. The ENVRI Cluster represents the core component of the European environmental research infrastructure landscape, with the ENVRI community as their common forum for collaboration and co-creation. The topics covered by the ENVRIs span the entire range of scientific objectives relevant for Earth system monitoring.

The community has developed the ENVRI-Hub as a central platform for accessing interdisciplinary FAIRfied environmental research assets, serving as an essential ENVRI community's interface to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Through the ENVRI-Hub, the ENVRI community shares their FAIRness experience, technologies, and training as well as research products and services. The architecture and functionalities of the ENVRI-Hub are driven by scientific applications, use cases and user needs. Its three main pillars are the ENVRI Knowledge Base as the human interface to the ENVRI ecosystem, the ENVRI Catalogue of Services as the machine-actionable interface to the ENVRI ecosystem, and finally, subdomain and cross-domain scientific use cases as demonstrators for the capabilities of service provision among ENVRIs and across Science Clusters.

The Science Demonstrators are being developed by several RIs in parallel. They are the key product to express the ENVRI-Hub’s potential regarding easy access to metadata and services, data discovery, as well as the promotion of interoperability in science across sub-domains. Science Demonstrators are built with Jupyter Notebooks - an open-source web application that allows one to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. Uses include cross domain data access, data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modelling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more. The Jupyter Notebook environment forms the nucleus of the future ENVRI Virtual Research Environment.

The ENVRI Science Demonstrators and Science Projects in the Horizon 2020 project EOSC Future aim at demonstrating how joint projects can address major challenges for Europe’s societies and how research infrastructures can support Horizon Europe’s missions within the EOSC. Presented Science Demonstrators cover one ENV domain wide service on the collocation of sampling sites, and two science cases from atmospheric and marine research, respectively.

Acknowledgement: ENVRI-FAIR has received funding from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 824068. Part of the work is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 project EOSC Future under grant agreement No 101017536. This work is only possible with the collaboration of the ENVRI-FAIR partners and thanks to the joint efforts of the whole ENVRI-Hub team.