Nowadays, sensors, surveys and lab experiments are producing increasingly large quantities of data, many tools are available to elaborate and analyse them in often fragmented stand-alone systems that may hinder collaboration and comprehensive understanding.

e-Infrastructures and Virtual Research Environments (VREs) permits researchers located in different places world-wide to cooperate in research activities, national and international projects from their home institutions. They rely on e-Infrastructures enabling collaborations among researchers providing shared access to unique or distributed scientific facilities including data, instruments, computing and communications. VREs are revolutionising the way research is conducted by providing a cohesive ecosystem where researchers can manage the entire research lifecycle—from data collection and analysis to publication and sharing in the spirit of the Open Science principles and guaranteeing multi-disciplinary approaches.

This session aims to bring together case studies and innovative approaches from the different domains of the earth sciences to stimulate discussion in this multi-disciplinary applied research field. We seek for contributions from all disciplines of the earth sciences that faced the different aspects related to e-infrastructures and VREs, ranging from the implementation from an IT point of view to software implementation, used and collected data, analysis tools implementation, but also policies for e-infrastructure utilisation, highlighting best practices and lessons learned.