The UK Environmental Data Service; transdisciplinary data sharing using common standardised approaches, from National to European

The Natural Environment Research Council Environmental Data Service (NERC EDS) provides integrated data services across the breadth of NERC’s data holdings and coordinates closer collaboration and development between NERC’s five environmental data centres. Data is central to modern understanding of our environment. Environmental science is underpinned by access to high quality sources of data and data services. As the principal funder of environmental science in the UK, NERC has supported comprehensive data services and policies since its creation over 50 years ago. Today NERC has five Environmental Data Centres embedded within its Research Centres:
• The British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) provides data and services across marine science and is embedded within the National Oceanography Centre.
• The Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) provides both atmospheric and Earth Observation data and is embedded within the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the National Centre for Earth Observation.
• The Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC) supports the data requirements of the terrestrial and freshwater sciences and is embedded within the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
• The UK Polar Data Centre (PDC) is responsible for all of the UK’s polar data holdings and associated services and is embedded within the British Antarctic Survey.
• The National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC) provides geoscience and subsurface data and services and is embedded within the British Geological Survey.
Each of the five environmental data centres specialises in data within a particular sub-discipline of environmental science and serves not only NERC’s science community but also a much broader community of users and stakeholders, which span research, industry, education, government and voluntary organisations. At the same time, science and its applications are becoming increasingly multi-disciplinary. Often users of NERC data will need to access the services provided by multiple data centres, they will also need to be interoperable in a European and global context.
In order to serve an ever-growing community of data users and stakeholders, in 2018 NERC created its Environmental Data Service to coordinate across the data centres. During its first five years the EDS has provided growing coordination between NERC’s data centres, both for user services and the development of new, discipline-independent services.
NERC has recently recommissioned its data services for the period 2023-2028. As a consequence, the EDS is embarking on an ambitious plan to deliver increasingly integrated services across the full breadth of NERC science and meeting the environmental data needs of stakeholders and users across the UK and beyond. This will require further development of common back-end services and front-end development of FAIR practices including standardised vocabularies and ontologies to support both disciplinary science and wider stakeholder engagement but increasingly an approach to transdiciplinarity to facilitate both next generation science and approaches to foster wider data engagement in responding to the grand societal challenges.