Common Challenges and Requirements

Research infrastructures available for researchers in environmental and Earth science are diverse and highly distributed; dedicated research infrastructures exist for atmospheric science, marine science, solid Earth science, biodiversity research, and more. These infrastructures aggregate and curate key research datasets and provide consolidated data services for a target research community, but they also often overlap in scope and ambition, sharing data sources, sometimes even sites, using similar standards, and ultimately all contributing data that will be essential to addressing the societal challenges that face environmental research today. Thus, while their diversity poses a problem for open science and multidisciplinary research, their commonalities mean that they often face similar technical problems and consequently have common requirements when addressing the implementation of best practices in curation, cataloguing, identification and citation, and other related core topics for data science.