Around 130 participants from 67 partner institutions came together to strengthen the exchange within the community, continue joint developments, and discuss next steps for the second funding phase of the consortium.
The plenary featured a diverse programme with emphasis on interactive formats and collaborative work. It opened on Wednesday with a set of community-proposed workshops, covering topics such as:
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- BITS - Semantic Tools in Earth System Science (Anette Ganske, Andrea Lammert, Alexander Wolodkin)
- RDMO Earth-Sensor (Corinna Rebmann, Bjarne Biskamp)
- TIB Knowledge Loom (Markus Stocker)
- Geospatial foundation models (Fabian Gans, Matthias Pohl)
- Educational Concepts for NFDI4Earth (Dominik Hezel)
- Water Science & Hydro Use Cases (Sami Domisch, Jörg Seegert)
On Thursday, a central part of the schedule was dedicated to presentations of pilots and use cases from the first funding phase, including:
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- German Marine Seismic Data Access (Janine Berndt)
- GeoFresh (Sami Domisch)
- CAMELS-DE: Hydrological datasets from and for the community (Alexander Dolich)
- Deadtrees.earth: A community driven infrastructure for tree mortality monitoring from local to global scales (Kilian Gerberding)
- World settlement portal and EOC Data Portal (Jan-Karl Haug)
- PhenoMapping - A participatory visual tool for curation and verification of historical phenological data (Yu Feng)
- LLM-enabled I-ADOPT Variable Extraction using Semantics (Arvin Rastegar)
- Unlocking Multifunctional Insights with Near Surface Geophysical Data Harmonization (Ulrike Werban)
Find an overview of our products and activities of the first funding phase here.
💡Furthermore, hands-on workshops provided space for in-depth exchange on topics such as the NFDI4Earth Label, the Living Handbook, future Lighthouse Use Cases, AI applications in the Earth system sciences, and service information management. The programme was complemented by a software marketplace and a poster session, offering further opportunities to explore ongoing developments and applications.
A selection of the presented posters is already uploaded in our NFDI4Earth Zenodo community.
🔑 International keynotes by Juha Oksanen (Geoportti, Finland), Alessandro Rizzo (Data Terra, France), and Barbara Ebert (NFDI4Biodiversity) added valuable external perspectives and highlighted broader European developments and opportunities for collaboration towards #OneNFDI, picking up on themes already discussed throughout the plenary in contributions from Base4NFDI, FAIRagro, NFDI4Objects, and NFDI4Biodiversity.
🤝 Of course there was also opportunity for personal exchange among participants: the meeting provided an important forum for discussions as well as for strengthening connections across the wider NFDI community.
The full programme of the NFDI4Earth Plenary 2026 is still available here.
Thanks to all participants, contributors, and speakers for a successful NFDI4Earth Plenary 2026 – see you next year 👋!