EARTH SCIENCE INFORMATION PARTNERS (ESIP): OPTIMIZING COLLABORATIONS TO MAKE DATA MATTER

Thanks to expanding technical capabilities, Earth science researchers can now generate and analyze larger volumes of data than ever before, thus allowing them to ask increasingly complex scientific questions. With these advances come new hurdles for researchers, as well as for data and information practitioners related to the collection, management, distribution, and analysis of data. These hurdles can be overwhelming for an individual or single organization. The Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP; https://esipfed.org) helps individuals and organizations navigate these challenges by connecting people across the data life cycle and across sectors, enabling them to leverage their collective expertise and technical capacity to find or create solutions that they can then employ in their own work.

ESIP fosters rich collaborative experiences like in-person meetings, virtual collaborations, and seed funding opportunities that help people find one another and work together on common data challenges. There are 20+ community-driven virtual collaboration areas that ESIP supports around topics like cloud computing, data stewardship, machine learning, and semantic technologies, as well as application areas like agriculture and climate, disasters, and more. Some of these groups provide a forum for open discussion, while others host webinar series, and still others develop guidelines, including resources that help researchers manage their data. ESIP staff and collaborative methods and infrastructure form a strong and supportive backbone for the varied work that the collaboration areas do. This backbone is flexible in that it allows ESIP staff to be responsive to the needs of each group, but it also provides a way to quickly onboard new groups interested in collaborating on emerging Earth science data challenges or opportunities. ESIP also supports its community members by providing avenues for resource sharing and engagement with the broader Earth science community, such as through Data Fairs held at a growing number of professional meetings. Through these means, ESIP aims to ensure that we continue to harness the power of human connections to push the limits of what is currently possible and ultimately to make data matter.