October 26, 2018 Anniversary Issue

In this edition: 
  • A Year in the Life - SCC Anniversary
  • Enabling FAIR Data Products
  • Siberian Environmental Change Network
  • FORUM on International Cooperation among ERIs
  • Space Week - Marine Institute (Ireland)
  • Calendar of Events
A Year in the Life - SCC Anniversary
The Strategic Cooperation Council (SCC), formed during the Fall 2017 American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting, is approaching its one-year anniversary. During the year, the SCC developed as an important entity facilitating communications and alignment among international environmental research infrastructures. The work of the SCC contributes to knowledge sharing, identifying areas of complementarity, and opportunities for additional projects. These activities enhance the work and potential contributions of the individual research infrastructures improving scientific and societal outcomes.

The SCC grew from the combined activity of the COOPEUS Strategic Cooperation Board and the COOP+ Open Board and addresses a key gap in the landscape of research infrastructures, funders, and non-governmental organizations. The SCC provides a neutral, ‘middle-out’ space for these entities to share information, develop common understandings and shared visions, and to identify specific areas for collaboration.

In addition to the face-to-face meetings at AGU 2017 and EGU 2018 and bi-monthly virtual meetings, the SCC has initiated knowledge sharing through a monthly newsletter and the SCC website . The SCC has served as a focal point for soliciting inputs for the COOP+ development of the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), and cross-research infrastructure collaboration of the Plant Phenology Ontology (PPO), and the Kepler Workflow project.

The next planned face-to-face gathering of the SCC is scheduled to take place during the upcoming Fall 2018 AGU meeting in Washington, DC. Planning for year two activities will be a main focus for the meeting.

Congratulations to the SCC for your one-year anniversary and best wishes for continued success!
Enabling FAIR Data Products
Christine Laney
NEON - Battelle

The Enabling FAIR Data Project ' s Second Stakeholder Workshop, held in Washington, DC September 12-13, brought together a wide range of people and organizations seeking to support open data through the research lifecycle - from research to publication to reuse. Several COOPEUS members attended. The acronym FAIR Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), was initially developed by the FORCE11 working group in 2014, and FAIR principles were published in 2016 . 
 
At the workshop, members of funding organizations, research networks, data repositories, and publishers discussed topics such as:
  • Provision of training and support for researchers to generate, share, and publish FAIR data
  • Sustainability and certification of data repositories that provide FAIR data
  • Methods and mechanisms that publishers can use to support FAIR data sustainably
For more information about how you or your organization may participate, check out the recently released Commitment Statement in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences.
Siberian Environmental Change Network (SECNET)
A new and developing network for detecting, understanding and predicting Siberian Environmental Change and its Societal Consequences
Olga Morozova
Tomsk State University

SecNet is led by Tomsk State University, Russia, and was launched in 2016 within the first workshop in partnership with INTERACT, University of the Arctic, USA’s NEON and the Canadian Mountain Network. Participants included researchers from Barnaul, Yakutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Surgut, Salekhard and beyond.

The scientific agenda of SecNet is to meet the challenges of: the changing regional climate; water shortages; the risks of biodiversity degradation; developing ecologically sustainable land use; and improving economic, social & cultural quality of life.

SecNet’s aims are to:
  • link world-class international and Russian institutes researching Siberia to identify and predict changes in the environment and the natural resources of Siberia due to changes in climate and human influences
  • link multiple disciplines and approaches
  • provide a single information gateway in Siberia for the acquisition, storage, analysis and classification of data on environmental change and its consequences
  • communicate knowledge to educators, researchers, policy-makers and the public to identify adaptive strategies

The need to adapt to future environments in Siberia is urgent. To be successful, adaptation requires that researchers, local peoples and decision makers work together better than at present. To improve this dialogue, SecNet was instrumental in bringing together an international meeting in Salekhard in November 2017 with a focus on how better to understand winter weather and climate extremes in the context of climate change impacts. The third SecNet international workshop - in Salekhard, October 2018 - was devoted to the issues how the large scale research infrastructures can contribute to more sustainability of the development of the territories and societies. 

SecNet Mega-facility
The facility consists of a large number of field stations and other research sites across 3000km from the southern semi-desert mountainous region of the Altay high mountains up to the Arctic coast.

This transect enables study of an extremely broad range of environments, from polygonal tundra and permafrost zones, through thermokarst lakes, flood plains and the biggest peatland area in the world, right up to the arid steppes and the glaciated high mountains. There are further plans of SecNet to expand the range to include up to 7000km from western to eastern Siberia and to extend the north-south transect even further north into the high arctic.

THE UNIQUENESS OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE IS THE FOLLOWING:
  1. The vast environmental range of the infrastructure cannot be duplicated anywhere on Earth because the territories are linked by river.
  2. The scientific agenda is based on multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, using combinations of methods of socio-humanitarian and natural sciences.
  3. The infrastructure is provided with unique scientific resources covering more than 100 years of observation of natural processes in the territory, primarily in Western Siberia, which adds a vast timespan “past-present-future” to the vast special range.
  4. The conceptual methodology “4M” (monitoring, manipulation, modeling, management), that was developed by Terry V Callaghan, is a general concept for the research projects which are been carried out using the infrastructure.

SECNET is open to collaboration from around the world.
www.secnet.online/home-eng.html
FORUM on International Cooperation among Environmental Research

Valentina Tegas
Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia

COOP PLUS project (Cooperation Of Research Infrastructures To Address Global Challenges In The Environment Field), funded by the European Commission within HORIZON 2020 programme, is organizing an international event “FORUM on International Cooperation among Environmental Research Infrastructures (RIs)” , which will take place in Brussels on the 19th of November 2018.

The project is working to strengthen the links among the ESFRI Research Infrastructures related to marine sciences, Arctic research and biodiversity with some International counterparts for leveraging international scientific cooperation.

This Forum is promoted with the following purposes:
  • present status of the international cooperation for environmental RIs, based on project results as well as on the main outcomes of ICRI Conference (which will take place in Wien, September 2018)
  • analyze the critical issues that still have to be dealt with to make the international cooperation among research infrastructures fruitful, efficient and long-lasting at global level agree on future activities.
  • enhance the international cooperation of environmental RIs also in the light of the present and future Research Programmes (e.g. HORIZON EUROPE).
  • launch an international board driving the international cooperation on the basis of a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda for coordinating, developing, exploiting and enhancing interoperability of RIs.

This Forum is meant to give the RIs a real opportunity to make a step ahead in the long-term planning of an international collaboration and to stimulate new cooperative initiatives

More information about the agenda and the registration is available here .
Space Week - National Argo Programme
The Argo network is a global array of autonomous profilers, deployed across the world's oceans, reporting subsurface ocean water properties to a wide range of users via satellite transmission. Argo floats measure temperature and salinity from the upper 2,000m of the ocean and these two essential climate variables describe the oceans’ physical and thermodynamic state. The Argo array is an indispensable component of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) required to understand and monitor the role of the ocean in the Earth’s climate system, in particular the heat and water balance.

Euro-Argo is an established European Research Infrastructure Consortium or ‘ERIC’ with the objective of developing a European "infrastructure" for Argo to a level where the European partners have the capacity to procure and deploy about 250 floats per year, to monitor these floats and ensure all data is processed and delivered to users (both in real-time and delayed-mode). With an average float lifetime of 4 to 5 years, such a European contribution would support approximately a quarter of the global array and provide an additional 50 floats per year to enhance coverage in the European and marginal seas. The current total number of Argo profiling floats globally is ~4,000.

Argo profiling floats use either ARGOS or IRRIDIUM satellite data transmission systems. ARGOS communication is a one way system, designed for the float to surface and send its data back to shore via satellite communications, this takes approximately 8-12hours while the float is at the surface. IRRIDUM communication is becoming more popular on Argo floats as it provides faster bi-directional data transmission allowing on-board parameters to be changed/altered from shore. Faster communication also ensures that the float spends less time at the surface ~20min to complete data transmission, which significantly reduces the risk of ship-strikes and bio-fouling. Argo is strongly complementary to satellite observations where data from Argo profiling floats can be used to ground-truth satellite data. The Argo data are readily assimilated with those from satellites into ocean circulation and climate models, in support of research and operational applications. The proposed contribution to the Argo array is integrated into the Copernicus programme and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

Read the full article here .
2018 CALENDAR OF EVENTS
October 29 -November 1: IEEE eScience Conference. Amsterdam, The Netherlands
November 5-8 : International Data Week. Bostwana, Africa
November 5-8 : RDA 12th Plenary Meeting part of International Data Week. Bostwana, Africa
November 5-9 : 7th ENVRI Week. Riga , Latvia
November 9-11: Arctic Biodiversity Congress 2018.  Rovaniemi, Finland
November 21&22: Final COOP+ Workshop. Brussels, Belgium
December 10-14 : AGU 2018. Washington, DC USA
STRATEGIC COOPERATION COUNCIL (SCC) HOMEPAGE
Celebrating 1 year!

View archi ved Strategic Cooperation Council newsletters!
Questions or comments please contact:

Melissa A. Genazzio
SAVI Staff Scientist