Common Challenges and Requirements

Research infrastructures available for researchers in environmental and earth science are diverse and highly distributed; dedicated research infra-structures 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 re-search 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.
In this chapter, we review the requirements gathering performed in the context of the cluster of European environmental and earth science research infrastructures participating in the ENVRI community, and survey the common challenges identified from that requirements gathering process.