NFDI4Earth – building the future

The NFDI4Earth, an Earth System Sciences (ESS) consortium within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), aims to mature and expand service ecosystem by strengthening service integration, governance, and technical foundations. Central to this effort is Service Portfolio Management, which coordinates the integration of existing and new services with key national and European infrastructures such as Helmholtz Earth & Environment DataHub, NFDI and European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). A Technical Review Board is intended to enable participative and evidence-based decision-making by defining technical requirements, evaluating solutions, and scouting relevant infrastructures. In parallel, NFDI4Earth aims to enhance its core services with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities to improve functionality and direct user interaction.

To ensure long-term sustainability, NFDI4Earth aims to establish a robust technical design and operational model for its service portfolio. This includes continuous improvement of the technical backbone, maintenance, further development of core services and embedding of research outcomes. An Agile Development Team is planned to implement service integration tasks and act as Service Stewards to embed services into active research projects. This structure ensures alignment with architectural standards, interoperability, and evolving user and infrastructure requirements.

User engagement and support are addressed through the expansion of the User Support Network (USN), which provides expertise in ESS data management and serves as a bridge between users and developers. The USN is planned to integrate AI-based assistance, including Large Language Model (LLM) -powered support bot, to improve responsiveness and usability while reducing routine support load. It also aims to play a key role in usability testing, feedback management, and collaboration with other NFDI consortia toward a federated, NFDI-wide support service.

Finally, innovation and advanced technology integration are envisioned to be conducted by the Experimental Tech Lab. This measure aims to develop AI-enabled services such as natural language-based data discovery, geospatial foundation models, and direct data interaction tools. It also seeks to integrate HPC resources and standardized workflows to support large-scale data processing and modeling. Together, these activities ensure that NFDI4Earth services remain cutting-edge, scalable, and well aligned with both national and European research data infrastructures.