2021 ESIP Winter Meeting

One of the strategic themes proposed for the ESIP 2021-2026 Strategic Plan is ‘Leading Innovation in Earth Science Data Frontiers’. This then begs the following questions:
1. Where are those Earth Science Data Frontiers?
2. Who is leading them?
3. How do we know that ESIP is at those frontiers?
4. How do we position ESIP to take advantage of emerging Frontiers?
5. How do we monitor emerging Earth Science Data Frontiers?

As a bottom up organisation, it is possible for ESIP to internally determine the changing face of Earth science data frontiers through:
1. Tracking clusters as they form and wane;
2. The evolution of session proposals at the ESIP Summer and Winter meetings;
3. Analysis of ESIP’s 5-year strategic plans through time;
4. Issues raised at Help Desks ESIP coordinates at conferences (AGU, GSA, EGU);
5. ESIP Lab submissions.

But we need to know how these Data Frontiers determined internally align with external initiatives elsewhere? Current international activities that ESIP is involved in include:
1. The Earth and Environmental Science Partners Downunder (E2SIP) cluster has been formed by the Oceania Partners of ESIP (AuScope, IMOS, TERN, NCI, CSIRO, ARDC). The goal of E2SIP is to leverage work of key interest undertaken in the ESIP community for Australian projects, and bring key Australian initiatives back to ESIP.
2. The ESIP/Research Data Alliance (RDA) Earth and Space and Environmental Science Interest Group (ESES-IG) is co-chaired by people form E2SIP, ESIP and the Environmental Research Infrastructure (ENVRI) FAIR project in Europe. The goal of ESES-IG is to connect these “Global North” data infrastructure initiatives to those in the “Global South” (Africa, South America, Asia, China, etc)
3. ESIP is a participatory organisation in GEO.

Combined these initiatives have the potential to build a global Map of the Landscape of data infrastructures and help determine the global Earth science Data frontiers. The ESIP/RDA ESES-IG and GEO also provide opportunities for close connections to the data frontiers in other domains such as Bio, Health, Agriculture.

The session will be run in as a workshop and will provide short presentations on ESIP’s international activities and potential ways to map ‘hot topics’ on data frontiers. It will actively then seek input from attendees on how THEY determine where the Earth science data frontiers are and more importantly how they would KNOW if ESIP is at them.

How to prepare for this session: Please come with your ideas on what you think are the current frontiers of Earth science data, ask if ESIP is in participating at them, and present ideas on how you determine what these data frontiers are.