Facilitating Virtual International Networking: Earth and Environmental Science Partners (E2SIP) Downunder

Dr Lesley Wyborn¹, Dr Simon Cox², Ms Natasha  Simons³, Dr Jens Klump⁴, Dr Mingfang  Wu⁵

¹Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
²CSIRO Land and Water, Melbourne, Australia
³Australian Research Data Commons, Brisbane, Australia
⁴CSIRO Mineral Resources, Kensington, Australia
⁵Australian Research Data Commons, Melbourne, Australia

Significant public investments in Australia, USA and Europe are building equivalent national-scale Earth and environmental science data and information infrastructures to support research into topics such as sustainable development of natural resources, climate change, water and food security, etc. We now need international collaboration to harmonise these national efforts into global frameworks that leverage components that can be shared, but still allow for local system variations.

Pre-COVID-19, active interaction by Australians with groups developing data infrastructures internationally was already difficult because of high travel costs: post-COVID-19 interactions are proving even harder. Although virtual interaction has improved significantly, time zones are a killer, making it extremely difficult to effectively and efficiently achieve what was formerly undertaken in Face-2-Face workshops and summits.

Over the last 20 years, the US-based Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), supported by NASA, NOAA and the USGS, have operated multiple clusters (aka communities of practice) that have developed standards and best practices to make data and software FAIR.  Many ESIP clusters (e.g., Information Quality, Semantic Harmonisation, Schema.org, Drones, Research Object Citation, Physical Sample Curation) are of direct relevance to Australia.  E2SIP formed in 2018 to enable closer liaison with relevant ESIP clusters and to facilitate cross pollination of ideas between the two.

This BOF will focus on planning more effective collaborations with ESIP through E2SIP. There will be two deep dives: one on how to effectively manage virtual collaboration across diverse time zones and the other to determine priority areas in Australian Earth and environmental infrastructures for collaboration.

Biography:

Lesley Wyborn is an Honorary Professor at the School of Earth Sciences and NCI at ANU and also works part time for ARDC. She had 42 years’ experience in GA in research and data management. She is Chair of the Academy of Science ‘National Data in Science Committee’ and is on the AGU Data Management Advisory Board and the ESIP Board. She is also co-chair of the ESIP/RDA Earth, Space and Environmental Science Interest Group.