Bridging legally mandated national spatial data infrastructures with European Earth system science: the German Geoportal and transnational coordination

European Earth system science increasingly depends on seamless access to authoritative and interoperable spatial data across administrative and national borders. While many European research infrastructures focus on scientific data production, long-term sustainability and reproducibility also require the systematic inclusion of legally mandated public-sector geodata, which can complement initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). This contribution presents how Germany’s Spatial Data Infrastructure (GDI-DE), through its national discovery and access portal Geoportal.de and its European coordination activities, supports this integration.

 

Geoportal.de is Germany’s central discovery and access portal for geospatial data and services provided by federal, state and local authorities. It implements a federated, legally grounded model in which hundreds of data providers publish INSPIRE-compliant metadata and services through standardized interfaces. This allows scientists to discover, evaluate and access authoritative reference data, environmental monitoring data and thematic geodata that are often not available through purely research-driven infrastructures, thereby providing a stable backbone for FAIR-aligned access to public-sector Earth system data in Germany.

Beyond national service provision, the German Coordination Office for Spatial Data Infrastructure actively contributes to European technical coordination through the MIG-T,  the permanent technical subgroup of the INSPIRE MIG. Within this framework, the coordination office of the GDI-DE coordinated the German stakeholder involvement in the recent INSPIRE consolidation process, which aimed at simplifying and modernizing the INSPIRE framework while ensuring continuity for operational infrastructures. This national coordination complemented parallel activities across Europe, helping to align national and European perspectives on the future of INSPIRE.

We argue that the combination of legally mandated national SDIs and European-level technical coordination is a key enabler for Earth system science, providing long-term, quality-controlled and interoperable access to public-sector geodata while allowing research infrastructures to focus on scientific value generation.