Bringing in-situ data to light: A formal approach to bridging user needs and provider capacities for enhanced data availability

When referring to Earth Observation data, we consider two sides of the same coin: space-based data and in-situ data collected on or near to the ground. While satellite-derived data benefits from a consolidated data management and sharing practices, in-situ data is more complex, highly heterogeneous by nature, involving a wide range of actors and data sources, which creates significant challenges in making this data standardised, integrated and interoperable, and ultimately, accessible and usable.

Willing to address these challenges, the InCASE project —supported by the European Environment Agency and funded by the European Commission as a contribution to the Group on Earth Observations (GEO)— developed the Geospatial in-situ requirements (G-reqs) tool. Designed primarily to support GEO Work Programme activities but open to contributions beyond GEO, G-reqs acts as a database and a standard methodology to collect and manage user requirements for in-situ datasets.

The development of G-reqs was done with the hope that the content generated will help in identify shared requirements across domains, detect barriers and gaps, and act as a bridge between user demands and data providers by facilitating the matchmaking between the required and the produced data, or even to prioritize new in-situ data collection strategies. During the last year, the focus was on engaging with the user community to collect as many requirements as possible trying to avoid bias in particular theme, backgrounds, or geographic regions.

In this communication we analyse the content of the G-reqs and discuss to what extent it can fulfil the hopes described before via a series of showcases and statistical overalls. The presented approach demonstrates user-driven solutions and the significance of initiatives like GEO in advancing Open Science and extract new knowledge enabling cross-domain interaction for environmental research and decision-making.