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Editorial
Dear reader,
the days are getting shorter as the year is drawing to a close, but it is still too early to summarise. There are numeours activities to report for the previous months and some upcoming events in December. Among the achievements for NFDI4Earth is the submission of our interim report at the end of September, which documents the consortium's outputs after the first three years. Another milestone is the publication of the NFDI4Earth FAIRness and Openness Commitment - please read, discuss, and of course, sign it.
This newsletter functions as an information hub based on your contributions. It will be published at least once per quarter, and the submission deadline is usually two weeks before the end of a quarter. For the final newsletter in 2025, please send your content at the latest by 15 December 2024 and see our Newsletter webpage for further details.
But now enjoy reading!
The NFDI4Earth Newsletter Team
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University of Freiburg & Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde
The 3rd Pilot Cohort starts beginning 2025
Welcoming our 2nd NFDI4Earth Academy Cohort
Spot on... NFDI4Earth
NFDI Success Stories
NFDI4Earth FAIRness and Openness Commitment
Participate in NFDI4Earth
Helpdesk: Question of the Quarter
Join the NFDI4Earth Academy Coffee Lectures
NFDI4Earth Outcomes
NFDI4Earth Interest Group on FAIR HPC data at NHR conference
NFDI4Earth involved in the FAIR-IMPACT Support Action Recommendations
Spatial Data Science across Languages (SDSL) Workshop 2024
DMG Date Science Short Course 2024 at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main
Meet us here
NFDI cross-consortia collaboration on Large Language Models in scientific publishing
NFDI4Earth meets NFDI DMP Basic Service
NFDI4Earth @ EGU 2025
International News
1st EOSC Node is operational after EOSC 2024
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Two new partners join NFDI4Earth
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The University of Freiburg was established in 1457 and is one of Europe’s oldest universities, combining tradition with innovation across its 11 faculties, including the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources. The university places a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, sustainability, and addressing pressing global environmental challenges.
The Chair of Sensor-based Geoinformatics (Geosense) within the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources leverages advanced geospatial and sensor-based technologies to study and monitor Earth’s biosphere and ecosystems. This includes data from Earth observation satellites, drones, and citizen science, which are analysed using data analytics methods, such as deep learning and computer vision. We utilise these sensor and computational technologies to uncover distributions of plant species, functional traits, biodiversity, plant stress, and tree mortality.
Within NFDI4Earth, the Chair of Sensor-based Geoinformatics is leading the GeoLabel Pilot Project, which addresses challenges of geospatial data labelling in Earth System Sciences (ESS). Existing annotation tools struggle with large-scale geospatial data, often lacking compatibility with common formats like GeoTIFF, NetCDF and Zarr, and falling short in collaborative features. GeoLabel will develop a WebGIS-based annotation tool for georeferenced labelling, including project and user management, standardised metadata, crowd-sourcing compatibility, and AI-assisted labelling. GeoLabel will support the ESS community in producing high-quality, AI-ready geospatial datasets.
Teja Kattenborn (University of Freiburg)
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The Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW), a member institute of the Leibniz Association, is a non-university marine research institute in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. In its four departments Physical Oceanography, Marine Chemistry, Biological Oceanography and Marine Geology, the basic disciplines of marine research are represented. Its interdisciplinary research programme is directed towards a holistic view of coastal and marginal seas with a special focus on the Baltic Sea ecosystem. The IOW provides research and data infrastructures with access for a broader scientific community.
As a founding member of the Leibniz Research Network “Earth & Societies” (formerly “Integrated Earth System Research”), the IOW has been in close contact for many years with other Leibniz institutions that have already been members of the NFDI4Earth consortium. Through these contacts and IOW's membership within the DAM (Deutsche Allianz für Meeresforschung) there has long been an interface to the NFDI4Earth consortium. In September 2024, the IOW has been included as the 65th partner in NFDI4Earth and will now actively participate in the User Support Network (USN). In addition, IOW is currently seeking an official partnership in NFDI4Biodiversity where it aims for enhancing availability and FAIRness of marine biodiversity-related data.
As part of NFDI4Earth, IOW will support the existing USN team in responding to user queries on aspects of FAIR handling of research data and associated infrastructures. The existing USN expertise will be expanded and strengthened by IOW’s many years of experience in the areas of oceanographic databases for hydrochemical and biological data, as well as data curation, software development, model data solutions and support for FAIR data publication.
Manja Placke (IOW Warnemünde)
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The 3rd pilot cohort starts beginning 2025
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Our third call for NFDI4Earth Pilots attracted 24 excellent proposals, all showing remarkable potential for advancing Earth System Sciences. From this strong field of candidates, five projects have been selected to form our 3rd NFDI4Earth Pilot Cohort. We extend our sincere thanks to all reviewers whose expertise and dedication made this rigorous selection process possible. The projects are:
- CAMELS-DE PLUS. Dr. Mirko Mälicke and his team at the KIT will enhance and update their already well-established hydrological dataset CAMELS by implementing a new community standard.
- GeoLabel, led by Prof. Dr. Teja Kattenborn at the University of Freiburg, will create a WebGIS-based annotation tool that supports georeferenced labeling.
- At the University of Göttingen, Prof. Dr. Matthias Willbold and his team will develop an adaptable quality evaluation tool for the GEOROC geochemical database.
- 4D-WORKS, under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Katherina Anders at TU Munich, will develop a curation workflow and best practice metadata for 3D time series data acquired through laser scanning or photogrammetry. The project addresses the current lack of standards and will improve data interoperability and reusability.
- The Geofresh platform is now in its third funding round and the team of Dr. Sami Domisch at IGB will continue to enhance their well-established platform by connecting various geospatial tools to improve freshwater research capabilities.
Find out more details about our NFDI4Earth Pilots on our webpage.
Kolja Nenoff (University of Leipzig)
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Welcoming our 2nd NFDI4Earth Academy Cohort
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The 2nd NFDI4Earth Academy Cohort fellows during their kick-off-meeting in Potsdam.
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We are very happy to announce that our second NFDI4Earth Academy cohort has started on June 1st 2024. Our selection committee accepted 34 excellent fellows from 23 research institutions from across Germany, which met during the kick-off meeting (see above).
Our Kick-off meeting took place from June 10th to June 12th, 2024, in Potsdam. This first gathering set the stage for the upcoming two years of collaborative learning, research, and innovation. In addition to scientific exchange, networking, and community building, we identified these core areas for the NFDI4Earth Academy: machine/deep learning & explainable and trustworthy AI, programming skills, statistical and time series analyses, satellite data and FAIR data management.
Between July and September, the fellows participated in a series of online lectures and discussions centred around research data management and various topics in data science. From September 30th to October 2nd, we held our cross-cohort meeting, bringing together the first and second cohort. This event included a workshop on visualising science projects, opportunities for inter-cohort exchanges, an excursion, and a farewell celebration for the first cohort. Looking ahead, our next in-person event will be the Spring School in 2025, where we will focus on FAIR data principles and data manipulation techniques
For more information about the NFDI4Earth Academy and our open events, please visit our webpage.
We thank all attending fellows for their valuable contributions!
Jonas Kuppler (GFZ Potsdam & Geo.X), Effi Drews (FZ Jülich & Geoverbund ABC/J) & Kristin Sauerland (MARUM & Deutsche Allianz Meeresforschung) with support of ChatGPT
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In September and October, the NFDI published our latest NFDI4Earth Success Stories, which highlight the close collaboration between NFDI4Earth and a diverse range of partners to advance scientific data infrastructures. These success stories underscore the progress being made in Earth System Sciences and demonstrate the diversity and relevance of NFDI4Earth contributions and its partners to the research data landscape. The success stories are:
- NFDI4Earth Academy - supporting a new generation of Earth System Data Scientists: Supporting the next generation of data scientists through training, mentoring, and innovative resources,
- Providing high-resolution World Settlement Footprint (WSF®) as FAIR geospatial data: Providing high-resolution global settlement datasets to support multidisciplinary research,
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Cooperation with re3data: join forces to improve Earth System Sciences repositories’ descriptions: Improving the visibility of Earth system repositories through optimised metadata and persistent identifiers, and
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Long-term archiving: Community engagement on digital long-term preservation: Promotion of the FAIR principles and development of standards for the sustainable archiving of research data.
We thank our partners for their valuable contributions!
Christin Henzen (TU Dresden), Ira Gerloff (LIAG - Institute for Applied Geophysics Hannover)
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NFDI4Earth FAIRness and Openness Commitment
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NFDI4Earth invites organisations, institutions, groups, and individuals from the Earth System Sciences community and beyond to sign a statement of commitment and to become ambassadors for a cultural change in academia. Signatories commit to promoting FAIRness and Openness in Earth System Sciences and to valuing data infrastructures and data experts. A signature is a public signal of agreement with the goals and values of the Commitment and of support for the mission, products, and services of NFDI4Earth. The signatories form a community of practice that takes into account the full range of expertise and all relevant user groups of Earth System Sciences for a sustainable shift towards more FAIR and Open research.
The NFDI4Earth FAIRness and Openness Commitment has been developed through an open community consultation process and is intended to contribute to the discourse on adapting research culture to face current challenges.
Have a look at the commitment, sign it here, and discuss it with your colleagues today!
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Participate in NFDI4Earth
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Helpdesk: Question of the Quarter
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The User Support Network (USN) answers the questions submitted to the public helpdesk. To give you an impression of the USN's work, this regular section presents questions and answers for broadly relevant topics.
Question: Where to find a digital repository for spatial data of finished and ongoing projects including several processing levels and how get people from different institutes into one workflow?
Answer: We had a consulting meeting, showing examples of datasets available in a data repository from different projects, formats and processing levels. A data policy was recommended to explain the workflow, including a standardised project name, location vocabulary, moratorium rules and processing levels or methods. The form where to submit data to the repository and the functions how to filter data were explained.
Feedback: The person was very pleased to get all questions answered. We will keep an eye on the first submission!
Hela Mehrtens (GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel)
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Join the NFDI4Earth Academy Coffee Lectures!
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Please keep in mind to join the NFDI4Earth online Coffee Lecture series, scheduled from October 2024 to March 2025, every second Tuesday from 11:00 to 12:00 hrs. We will explore a wide array of exciting topics, including the newly established Data Competence Centers, the OneStop4All, and the advancements in Large Language Models.
For detailed information on upcoming lectures and registration, please visit our webpage.
Everybody is welcome and participation is free of charge!
Effi-Laura Drews (FZ Jülich & Geoverbund ABC/J, Kristin Sauerland (MARUM & Deutsche Allianz Meeresforschung) & Jonas Kuppler (GFZ Potsdam & Geo.X)
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NFDI4Earth Interest Group on FAIR HPC data at NHR conference
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The NFDI4Earth Interest group HPC (High performance commuting) participated in the NHR conference, held from 9 to 12 September at Darmstadt. In the joint networking session on 'Envisioning a NHRNFDI Collaboration on enabling FAIR implementation on HPC' aspects of the definition of data projects were discussed. A preliminary view into the results of a recent survey on data management from the NHR DataLake project underlines the importance to open data silos by additional services. The current challenge is to define re-use of HPC-data as an integral part of HPC service provision.
Stephan Hachinger (LRZ Munich), Stephan Frickenhaus (AWI Bremerhaven)
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Please keep in mind to join the NFDI4Earth online Coffee Lecture series, scheduled from October 2024 to March 2025, every second Tuesday from 11:00 to 12:00 hrs. We will explore a wide array of exciting topics, including the newly established Data Competence Centers, the OneStop4All, and the advancements in Large Language Models. For detailed information on upcoming lectures and registration, please visit our webpage.
Everybody is welcome and participation is free of charge !
Effi-Laura Drews (FZ Jülich & Geoverbund ABC/J, Kristin Sauerland (MARUM & Deutsche Allianz Meeresforschung) & Jonas Kuppler (GFZ Potsdam & Geo.X)
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NFDI4Earth involved in the FAIR-IMPACT Support Action Recommendations
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The EOSC FAIR-IMPACT is a European initiative that aims to support data repositories in complying with the FAIR guidelines in order to improve transparency and trust in repositories. In this context, the NFDI4Earth Label team is involved in a FAIR-IMPACT support action from May till September 2024 on the topic of 'Recommendations for trustworthy and FAIR-enabling data repositories'.
In this support action, the NFDI4Earth Label team had the opportunity to learn more about the upcoming FAIR-IMPACT guidelines, and to critically evaluate and shape them. This is very relevant for the NFDI4Earth, as these guidelines will apply to a number of NFDI4Earth repositories. The knowledge gained on the guidelines, and on the challenges repositories face when improving their FAIRness will also directly benefit the development of the NFDI4Earth Label.
Tim Schäfer (Senckenberg), Ronny Gey (UFZ Leipzig), Claudia Müller (AWI Bremerhaven)
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Spatial Data Science across Languages (SDSL) Workshop 2024
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