A European Dashboard showcasing the State of the Environment

The European Open Science Cloud is a pan-European initiative that aims at developing a federated infrastructure that supports scientific research and Open Science. Having the FAIR principles at the core of Open Science practices, the Environmental Research Infrastructures (ENVRIs) that operate in Europe collaborate at cluster level (the ENVRI cluster) continuously improving the FAIRness of their services and working towards becoming more interoperable among them but also with other clusters. To showcase the benefits of an integration platform that supports scientific workflows, the ENVRIs develop the “Dashboard for the State of the Environment” as a cross-discipline service to address with scientific facts the environmental concerns. The project brings together three scientific domains (Atmosphere, Biodiversity, Ocean) that each have set up analytical workflows to provide environmental indicators in real-time, allowing the users to visualise the “State of the Environment” by interacting with the service interface. 

The Dashboard is designed to be completely user configurable so that the users can select from a list the indicators to be shown and their order. Providers can add, remove and edit indicators through a standard REST API, that allows transferring all parameters, including the configuration of the indicators and how to provision data values and thumbnail interaction. The Dashboard is implemented and operated using engineering best practices, including YAML for the indicators’ descriptions and a robust and flexible container-based deployment. It builds on EOSC services like AAI, cloud services, and data storage, and the workflows that provide the indicators will also build on the EOSC and Research Infrastructure (RI) computing integration. As a proof of concept, a limited list of indicators is available, and we foresee that the participating RIs will provide many more indicator options in the near future. In addition, through the extension API it will be possible for new RIs to start providing indicators. 

The Dashboard service is completely open source, and, as the whole concept, it is designed to be flexible and expansible. Therefore, we encourage other clusters that are part of EOSC to use the service as another basis for disseminating their relevant indicators to a wider audience.