RCN: Accelerating development and expansion of a diverse environmental data science community and research agenda

Environmental science is becoming increasingly complex, requiring trans-disciplinary, data-driven approaches to address pressing research questions. New approaches to environmental science are needed, ones that rely on open, transparent, and reproducible data science methodologies and that prioritize diverse ways of problem solving. As the data science community continues to grow and develop more advanced, user-friendly methodologies for creating reproducible science, synergies are emerging between the data science and environmental science communities.

While these synergies have developed organically within specific projects and institutions, there has yet to be a concerted, trans-disciplinary effort to create a shared space and research agenda to unite this burgeoning Environmental Data Science (EDS) community and accelerate their work together. This Research Coordination Network will lay a foundation for a more cohesive and collaborative EDS community that reaches beyond disciplinary boundaries and establishes a common set of research principles and practices to lead this field into the future.

Annual Summits provide an excellent forum to bring this nascent research community together to discuss current challenges and opportunities, share cutting edge methodologies, and coalesce on new research directions. These Summits will be a hub for the EDS community and an incubator for new ideas and breakthroughs for years to come.

The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) communication team will work to reach a broad and diverse audience with social media, blog posts, and webinars. Any data and publications associated with the network will be made freely available through open-access portals, following a long commitment at NCEAS to open science. To allow for the greatest possible audience engagement with the annual summits, virtual attendance during keynote presentations, plenary presentations, and plenary discussions will be available and encouraged via live stream, and recordings of all keynote addresses will be made available on a dedicated EDS Community YouTube Channel.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.