EnviDat – Towards the Next Generation of a FAIR Environmental Data Repository with Enhanced Support for Open Science

Ionuț Iosifescu Enescu, Gian-Kasper Plattner, Thomas Kramer, Matthias Häni, Dominik Haas-Artho, Lucia Espona-Pernas and Konrad Steffen - Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape WSL

Abstract:
EnviDat (www.envidat.ch) is the FAIR environmental data portal and repository of the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL. Through EnviDat, WSL is making curated, quality-controlled, publication-ready research data accessible, in accordance with the WSL data policy. For the upcoming planning period until 2024, EnviDat has three main strategic development areas, namely an enhanced support for Open Science, support for raster and vector Geographic Information and integration and near real-time (NRT) visualization of monitoring data.
An enhanced support for Open Science in EnviDat is enabled in a variety of ways. Alongside metadata information and research datasets, EnviDat provides a platform for publishing additional research artefacts such as software. If the software is published as Jupyter Notebooks, these can also be executed on WSL’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster. The use of Jupyter Notebooks fosters sharing and exchanging of well-documented computer code, which enhances reusability, encourages distant collaboration in the environmental research community through common software development, and allows for interactive execution of the code.
With these developments, we (1) strengthen WSL’s commitment to accessible research data in order to advance science and (2) further evolve EnviDat towards a next generation environmental data repository.