First Achievements and Experiences from building NFDI4Earth - a National Research Data Infrastructure for Earth System Sciences

The ever-growing complexity of the multiple global challenges requires Earth System Sciences (ESS) to collaborate in interdisciplinary research and demands reliable and well-accessible research data as a foundation. NFDI4Earth, a consortium within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), addresses these needs by empowering researchers to adopt FAIR principles, enabling the discovery, access, and use of ESS data provided by partners and other sources. Uniting 66 partner institutions in Germany - from universities and research organizations over public agencies to infrastructure providers - NFDI4Earth brings together a wide range of expertise in data management. This submission highlights (first) NFDI4Earth achievements after three years of NFDI-funding and reflects on lessons learned.

NFDI4Earth gives an active role to the ESS communities, allowing them to advance FAIRness in several ways. Through open calls for NFDI4Earth Pilots, Incubators and EduPilots the community was invited to formulate needs, innovative ideas for RDM and competence building in ESS. More than 40 projects were funded and led to a variety of data products, software solutions and educational resources, all openly available for reuse by researchers, covering a breadth of ESS subdisciplines. NFDI4Earth offered information, training, and outreach to the ESS community in various formats.

NFDI4Earth launched first prototype versions of new services: The User Support Network offers ESS-RDM-support and operates as a federated system across RDM-support-desks of the NFDI4Earth partner institutions. The Knowledge Hub builds the information backbone and offers metadata over a broad range of resources including datasets, learning resources, repositories, and software source code. The EduTrain Portal provides access to a range of curated open educational resources related to RDM in the ESS. Finally, the OneStop4All serves at the portal to allow discovering and easily accessing all the NFDI4Earth resources.

To further advance the implementation of FAIR principles NFDI4Earth started designing an overarching NFDI4Earth Architecture and developing the NFDI4Earth Label as a means of classifying ESS-related repositories. The NFD4Earth Label intends (1) to help researchers find the most suitable repositories for data access and data publication, and (2) provides repository operators with a self-assessment tool for documentation and evaluation. In parallel, the recent launch of the first version of the NFDI4Earth FAIRness and Openness Commitment invites individuals and organisations to declare their support to NFDI4Earth and their intent to promote the transition to FAIR RDM in the ESS.

To secure sustained operation and cooperation networks NFDI4Earth established close cooperation with important national public environmental data and geodata infrastructures. Relevant research communities have pledged to closely link their data infrastructures and service developments to NFDI4Earth. NFDI4Earth is internationally connected, notably through involvements in initiatives like the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) contributing to the development, alignment, and adoption of global standards while fostering collaboration across borders.

NFDI4Earth is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), project number: 460036893.