NFDI4Earth – First steps towards a national ESS research data infrastructure

As part of a major German effort towards a national research data infrastructure, the NFDI4Earth (www.nfdi4earth.de) brings together researchers in the Earth System Sciences, their data, tools, and services to address their digital needs. NFDI4Earth is a community-driven process providing researchers with access to FAIR, coherent, and open ESS data, innovative research data management (RDM) and data science methods. It will do so by developing a central infrastructure that provides access to all ESS data sources, and tools via the OneStop4All to access, connect, visualise and generally research these.

The NFDI4Earth aims from early on for an open communication to and active involvement of the ESS community and the interested public, particularly its participants and interest groups. The structure of the NFDI4Earth was already presented on previous editions of this conference series and will therefore only be briefly summarised. The focus of this talk will be on the developments within the NFDI4Earth, its services and products. A lot has happened since its official start in January 2022, e.g., decisions on the software stacks, consideration of the various use cases, development of the knowledge hub and living handbook, starting of various interest groups, start of 14 pilot projects. Most importantly, we will point out where you can (and hopefully will) engage in the further development of the NFDI4Earth services and products because it is your feedback and participation that will allow us to develop the NFDI4Earth as close to the needs and expectations of the community as possible.