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ARPHA Conference Abstracts :
Conference Abstract
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Krutika Deshpande‡, Cedric J. Hagen§,|, Thomas G. Bornman¶,#,¤, Leo Chiloane#, Gregor Feig#, Elisa Girola«, Siddeswara Guru«, Christine Laney§, Henry W. Loescher§,», Michael Mirtl˄,˅, Beryl Morris«, Paula Mabee§, Emmanuel Salmon¦, Michael SanClements§,», Benjamin L. Ruddell‡, Pamela L. Sullivanˀ, Melinda D. Smithˁ, Werner L. Kutsch¦, Xiubo Yu₵, Steffen Zachariasℓ|
Corresponding author: Henry W. Loescher (hloescher@battelleecology.org)
Received: 15 May 2025 | Published: 02 Jun 2025
© 2025 Krutika Deshpande, Cedric Hagen, Thomas Bornman, Leo Chiloane, Gregor Feig, Elisa Girola, Siddeswara Guru, Christine Laney, Henry Loescher, Michael Mirtl, Beryl Morris, Paula Mabee, Emmanuel Salmon, Michael SanClements, Benjamin Ruddell, Pamela Sullivan, Melinda Smith, Werner Kutsch, Xiubo Yu, Steffen Zacharias
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Deshpande K, Hagen CJ, Bornman TG, Chiloane L, Feig G, Girola E, Guru S, Laney C, Loescher HW, Mirtl M, Morris B, Mabee P, Salmon E, SanClements M, Ruddell BL, Sullivan PL, Smith MD, Kutsch WL, Yu X, Zacharias S (2025) Towards Globally Harmonized Environmental Data: A Proof of Concept Using Ecological Drought and the GERI Framework. ARPHA Conference Abstracts 8: e159037. https://doi.org/10.3897/aca.8.e159037
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Abstract
Global environmental challenges like ecological drought demand cross-border collaboration and interoperable data. The Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (GERI) was founded to address this need, building relationships and establishing data sharing practices among six of the largest ecosystem research infrastructures in the world. Data harmonization is required to standardize and ingest data products from these infrastructures into a findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR) global dataset. Harmonized global data can improve existing global climate models and inform environmental research studies.
This poster presents a proof of concept for harmonizing ecological drought-related data products including air temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, soil temperature and soil texture starting with data from NEON (USA) and TERN (Australia). The process involved crosswalks for variable names and units, term mapping, and metadata standardization using controlled vocabularies and EML. We describe both technical and institutional challenges encountered in aligning data from diverse infrastructures, including differences in structure, granularity, and documentation. These lessons are shaping the development of scalable methods and shared practices as we expand the effort to include additional networks RIs. Looking ahead, we aim to broaden the scope of harmonization to additional ecological domains. This work will be led in part by GERI’s Early Career Researcher working group and pursued in collaboration with international initiatives like DroughtNet and the International Drought Experiment. These efforts mark progress toward a globally interoperable environmental data landscape in support of science, policy, and ecosystem resilience.
Presenting author
Henry W. Loescher
Presented at
POSTER
Acknowledgements
Authors wish to thank the US National Science Foundation (NSF) support for ‘AccelNet-Implementation: Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (GERI): Harmonizing Data to address Ecological Drought, (NSF 2301655), and ‘NRT-HDR: A team-based training paradigm integrating informatics and ecology.’ (NSF 1829075). NEON is a project sponsored by the US NSF and managed under cooperative support agreement NSF-2217817 to Battelle. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of our shareholders or sponsors.