Towards Globally Harmonized Environmental Data: a Proof of Concept Using Ecological Drought Data and the Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (GERI) Framework

Addressing global environmental challenges such as drought and climate change requires environmental analyses at a global scale, yet data from different sources remain fragmented and decentralized. While individual Research Infrastructures (RIs) effectively monitor ecosystems at national and continental scales, global environmental research requires more collaboration to bring these data together. The Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (GERI) addresses this gap by bringing together six major RIs: National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)/USA, Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN)/Australia, Integrated Carbon Observing System (ICOS)/Europe, European Long-Term Ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological systems Research Network (eLTER)/Europe, South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON)/South Africa, Chinese Ecosystem Research Network (CERN)/China, that span five continents, and distributed among >1600 observational sites globally. 
Harmonizing data at a large scale presents multiple challenges, including data availability, differing measurement protocols, formats, scales, and data delivery mechanisms. In addition, an effort of this scale requires a strong foundation of collaboration, communication, and governance, particularly across international geo-political boundaries and networks-of-networks. Using ecological drought as a use case example, GERI has developed a harmonization framework and cyberinfrastructure workflow that advances the data harmonization at a global scale, supports FAIR and open science, and is adaptable to other similar efforts. Environmental variables central to ecological drought, such as precipitation, soil moisture, and soil temperature, are widely measured across regions but may vary substantially in semantics and processing. GERI’s framework uses cross-walk tables and templates to align these variables in a standardized manner. Current harmonized datasets integrate observations from more than 130 sites, providing a basis for global-scale synthesis and comparative drought analyses.
Here, we present the data harmonization methods, challenges, and lessons learned from this effort. Moving forward, we aim to adapt this framework for other key ecological variables. We also plan to use AI tools to resolve current bottlenecks in workflows, data quality and metadata management. These efforts are intended to further support collaborative, global-scale environmental research through GERI.