2021 ESIP Winter Meeting

• Meeting Welcome (Susan Shingledecker)
• How Failing Forward Can Lead to Inspired Innovation (Caitlin Kontgis)
• Pushing forward the frontier: Lessons from the icy edge (Twila Moon)

View Recording

The Physical Samples Curation Cluster is a forum for the community supporting physical samples in the earth, space, and environmental sciences which includes but is not limited to geological and biological samples.  The cluster’s goal is to enhance discoverability, access, and use of sample collections.

At the ESIP 2020 Summer session, we brought together those interested in physical samples to discuss developing a centralized space within ESIP, which resulted in the founding of this cluster. In addition, we created a list of community needs and issues which we might tackle as a community.

The goal of our inaugural session will be to review these potential actives and discuss next steps. The list includes developing a webinar series to highlight existing tools and services, and creating working groups to address topics such as metadata interoperability, resources and infrastructure, and identifiers and citations.

We invite researchers, professionals such as curators, collection managers, and registrars, cyberinfrastructure providers and developers, and the user community to join this session to help shape the future of this cluster.

Agenda

• Introduction (10 minutes)
• Presentation on FAIR (10 minutes)
• Breakout activity to design cluster working group activities:
  • Introduction to breakout activity (5 minutes)
  • Breakout group discussions (25 minutes)
  • Group reports; 3 minutes per group (12 minutes)
  • Community discussion on group recommendations (20 minutes)
• Wrapup (8 minutes)

How to Prepare for this Session: Review the Cluster statement and the meeting notes from the ESIP 2020 Summer Session. These two documents will provide foundation for the discussions during the session.

Session Resources

• View Recording
  
• Meeting notes
• Session slides
• FAIR presentation
• Breakout slides
  • Group 1
  • Group 2
  • Group 3

The first half of this session will provide an overview of Amazon's Sustainability Data Initiative and give attendees an opportunity to ask specific questions to AWS experts about onboarding their team to the cloud. The second half of the session will focus on breaking into small groups based on common themes/challenges session attendees have identified. Attendees to this session should leave with a better understanding of how to transition your team's research computing to AWS and how to manage AWS cloud credits.

Agenda
10 min: Session Introduction (Annie Burgess, Sara Lubkin, Ana Privette)
45 min: AWS Q & A (Joe Flasher, Zac Flamig)
5 min: Determine breakout themes
20 min: Breakout based on attendee themes
10 min: Session Wrap-Up

View Recording
View Session Notes

ESIP has recently adopted updated Community Participation Guidelines. But how do they work in practice? How can you ensure that you encourage others to follow them? What happens if someone witnesses or experiences unacceptable behavior?

This session will try to answer your questions about the CPG, as well as be a forum to receive your feedback on the CPG. We want these guidelines to reflect the ESIP community values and as such, we want to ensure that diverse voices are heard and included.

How to prepare for this session: Read the ESIP Community Participation Guidelines and think about ways it is unclear or you are uncertain about how it applies. Come with suggestions for improvement or clarification. Attend with an open mind.

View Recording
Agenda and notes
Presentation

Recent efforts to standardize data sharing and archiving guidelines within research institutions, professional societies, and academic publishers make clear that the scientific community does not have consistent recommendations regarding data produced as output from computational simulations. The massive size of some simulation outputs, as well as the large computational cost to produce these outputs, present problems related to data storage, preservation, duplication, and replication. Large-scale and smaller-scale simulations present additional challenges related to usability, understandability, documentation, and citation.

The goal of the session is to engage data facilities and other ESIP participants in a discussion of the following questions:
How to determine the value of computational model outputs? Who makes this determination?
How are requests to archive data (including model outputs) currently funded?
How do archives maximize the utility of the model-based data?
How should model codes be made accessible?
How should citation work for model-based research, including all of its aspects (input data, model codes, processing codes, model output, metadata related to all of these)?

This session will feature multiple speakers who will present on different aspects of the challenges related to preserving and replicating simulation-based research. The first set of speakers, Gretchen Mullendore, Matt Mayernik, and Doug Schuster, will talk about the “What about Model Data?” project (https://modeldatarcn.github.io/), funded by the NSF as an EarthCube Research Coordination Network, which is focused on determining best practices for preservation and replicability of simulation experiments. Peter Fox will discuss his experiences as Editor in Chief of the AGU Earth and Space Science journal in working with authors of computational model-based papers, especially those on intercomparisons and evaluations. Mark Parsons will discuss challenges that computational models present for citation and identification of data and software. Gary Strand will discuss how these questions are dealt with for data produced by the Community Earth System Model (CESM) community.

View Recording
View Notes

Adoption and implementation of computational technologies along with the concepts of data science and machine learning have seen a steady acceptance and increase over the past decade in the field of Earth Science. One such technology at the forefront is the Jupyter Notebook.
Jupyter Notebook, an open-source web-based application, allows creation and sharing of documents containing code, results and accompanying documentation. Work in Notebooks is predominantly performed with R and Python, though many other languages are available. Jupyter Notebooks provide an interactive console-based approach making it easier for colleagues to understand the code, results, and goals.

This session encourages submissions of adoption, usage and current benefits, as well as, the use of Jupyter Notebooks as a method for publications and the potential benefits from such an endeavor. This direction aims to explore the usefulness of the reproducibility and replicability of experiments performed in Notebooks. The goal of this session is to highlight the importance and significant impact Jupyter Notebooks has had on projects and research so far and how taking it a step further by incorporating it as a form/format of publications will help in addressing the obstacles faced by scientists and readers alike when attempting to understand the experiments carried out in publications or when re-running an experiment following the methods in publications.

Our Speakers:
1. Dr. Lindsey Heagy:
 Dr. Heagy is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the UC Berkeley in the Statistics department, and will soon be an Assistant Professor of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Heagy is an active contributor to open source softwares for computational geophysics and open access educational resources to geosciences like SimPEG and GeoSci.xyz. She also leads geophysics component of the Jupyter meets the Earth project, which is in collaboration with Pangeo Project, Jupyter and the geoscience researchers at National Center for Atmospheric Research and UC Berkeley.

2. Dr. Fernando Pérez:
Dr. Pérez is an Associate Professor at the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley and a found co-investigator of the Berkeley Institute of Data Science. He is also a Faculty Scientist at the Data Science and Technology Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He created iPython while he was a graduate student in the year 2001 and is the co-founder of its successor, Project Jupyter. His work today focuses on creating tools for modern computational research and data science across domain disciplines with an emphasis on reproducible research.

3. Dr. Lynne Elkins:
Dr. Elkins is an isotope geochemist, petrologist and an Assistant Professor of Geology in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln. Dr. Elkins' research group focuses on using geochemistry to better understand the Earth's dynamic processes, in particular how magmas are generated in the Earth's mantle layer and how they are emplaced to form new crust. Dr. Elkins has implemented deep Earth complex system modeling in Jupyter Notebooks and also used the tool for a publication of the same project.

Following our speakers' talks we will open the floor for a discussion among all the attendees. 

How to prepare for our session:
We are going to have a quick walkthrough that helps you understand the basics of Jupyter Notebook. So, rest assured that you will be able to follow along if you are new to the application.

View Recording
View Notes

Community resilience is key for increasing a community’s capacity to prepare for, respond to, and adapt to life-changing events. Earth Science has a considerable role to play in contributing to community resilience, but there are still some challenges that must be overcome to improve how Earth Science data supports better decision-making for Community resilience. This session is organized by the Community Resilience cluster of ESIP.

This 90-minute workshop session will kick off with a brief overview of the Community Resilience cluster’s problem statement, focusing on identified challenges that earth science data practitioners may encounter while attempting to support community resilience. These challenges include: inequity, data ethics and governance, scale mismatch, and meeting data needs. Next, cluster participants will lead breakout groups with meeting participants to discuss potential recommendations and solutions for addressing the challenges. This working session is designed to collect input and evaluate the recommendations that the Community Resilience cluster has already put forward in order to fill in any gaps about promising approaches and solutions to include. We also seek ideas on how to implement the recommendations, as well as how we might engage and work with other ESIP clusters to do so.

To help you prepare, we'd like to draw your attention to a couple of key resources: 

• Our Problem Statement that we will be referring to during the presentation: shorturl.at/cksI2 
• Our Agenda & Notes document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aKc0daipuwG1V9oe4i7M_YR9qexFlbwzTWtBKnrpTVg/edit  

During the session, we'll be reflecting on these questions: 

• Could you give an example of a community that you’re a part of where community resilience might be relevant? 
• How do communities become more resilient? 
• What is the relationship of Earth Science to Community Resilience? 
• What are challenges for utilizing Earth Science to help support Community Resilience? 
• What are your recommendations for addressing some of these challenges?
• Is community resilience something that ESIP should be addressing? 

We will also be participating in the ESIP poster session: 

• Our poster: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1d8OAhk7dcz4IiFA15PdUGNyZiUPbA8yV-qmVW_DedCQ/edit#slide=id.gb1961ec412_0_0 

View Recording
View Session Notes

Description: The challenges confronting the Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) are increasingly complex, avoiding categorization or solution within neatly defined disciplinary boxes. Transdisciplinary, or "antidisciplinary," approaches are required to address threats in ESS like climate change and space weather.  However, existing approaches to integrating data and knowledge remain crippling to progress and collaboration. Thus, now is the critical time to bring together the antidisciplinary communities to create a new paradigm of knowledge integration using knowledge graphs/networks and semantic technologies. We will collect contributions that utilize these approaches to better structure knowledge across projects. This session will emerge the success stories and best practices for knowledge graphs across ESS.

Format: We propose to highlight the 'home run stories' in the Earth and Space Sciences to create knowledge graphs/networks that have improved information flows between individuals, projects, groups, and data systems. We will first feature these use cases, then hold a discussion period to emerge new articulation, methods, and research vistas for KGs across the Earth and Space Sciences. We hope that the discussion will emerge data models that can be generally used and processes for tailoring them to new applications.
Conveners:

• Ryan McGranaghan - Principal Data Scientist and Aerospace Engineering Scientist at ASTRA LLC
• Barbara Thompson - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Emily Law - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Lewis McGibbney - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Agenda

• (4 - 4:10 PM) Presentation - opening remarks    
  • Speaker: Ryan McGranaghan
• (4:10 - 4:20 PM) Introduction to panel speakers    
  • All; Ryan McGranaghan to moderate
• (4:20 - 4:45 PM) Panel Discussion    
  • General topics (panel member):
    • Different approaches to building a KG (Deborah L. McGuinness)
    • The socio-technical perspective of KGs (Juan Sequeda)
    • Role of KGs in AI/ML (Leilani Gilpin)
    • Using KGs to link domains (Krzysztof Janowicz)
• (4:45 - 5:10 PM) Breakout sensemaking groups    
• (5:10 - 5:25 PM) ‘What, so what, now what?' Exercise to get feedback from breakouts 
  • Moderator: Ryan McGranaghan and session conveners
• (5:25 - 5:30 PM) Concluding chat   

Panelists

• Juan Sequeda - Principal Scientist at data.world
• Krzysztof Janowicz - Professor of Geographic Information Science and Geoinformatics at the Geography Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
• Leilani H. Gilpin - Research Scientist at Sony AI; PhD MIT CSAIL
• Deborah L. McGuinness - Tetherless World Senior Constellation Chair and Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI); Founding director of the Web Science Research Center at RPI

View Recording
View Notes

In this session, we’ll be developing use cases for an ESIP online air quality resource center. The use cases we develop during the session will be used as a framework for planning a Summer Meeting hack-a-thon at which we will try to implement some technologies to satisfy one or more of the use cases. 
After a brief intro and ice-breaker, we’ll break into small groups. At the first 20 minute break-out session attendees will be asked to develop profiles for prospective users of our air quality resource center. Each group will be asked to document their user profile in real time and choose a spokesperson to present their user profile to the larger group when we reconvene. After presentation and discussion of the user profiles, we will have a second 20 minute break-out session where attendees will be asked to develop a use case for the user they profiled in the first break-out session. Again, each group will be asked to document their use case and present it to the larger group. We’ll conclude with the use case presentations and a group discussion to wrap up. 
Between now and the Summer Meeting, we’ll iterate on these use cases, and do some preliminary planning, resource identification, wire-framing, etc. for a summer hack-a-thon.

View Recording
View Notes

Led by the ESIP Marine Data Cluster and others

Interest in the subject and implementation of Analysis Ready Data (ARD), especially for remote sensing products, continues to build in the domain of science data producers and private industry, and their user communities.

In this session we will explore and hear about the landscape of ARD activities from science data producers, private industry stakeholders, and international coordination activities like the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) and others. We will solicit presentations on ARD definitions and assessment, implementation, and practical examples of ARD datasets and their applications highlighting both the successes and challenges.

One of the potential outcomes of this session is to build momentum toward more harmonization of diverse ARD activities and definitions.

How to prepare for this session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU3ZXOsH7DE&feature=youtu.be


Speakers 

• Ignacio Zuleta (ARD Zone): Virtual constellations, ARD and sensor fusion: the future of earth observation
• Steven Labahn (USGS, CEOS Land Surface Imaging Virtual Constellation (LSI-VC) Co-Lead ): CEOS Analysis Ready Data (ARD)
• Chris Lynnes (NASA): Analysis Ready Satellite Data in NASA’s EOSDIS

Agenda (Condensed)

• Introduction, logistics and audience poll
• 3 speakers and Q&A
• Breakout rooms and discussion
• Summary reports

Other Relevant Sessions:

• Best Practices and Fundamental Challenges of AI in Earth and Space Sciences (01/28 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm)
• Accelerating Artificial Intelligence Applications at Scale with AI-ready Data (01/29 • 11:00am - 12:30pm)
  
  

View Recording
View Notes

A major goal of the ESIP Semantic Harmonization Cluster is to promote common understanding and encourage discussion with other ESIP clusters that are developing vocabularies, thesauri, metadata schemas, or ontologies to increase the FAIRness of Earth Science data in potentially specialized domains (e.g. Marine, Soil, or Biological data). By adopting shared approaches among these efforts whenever possible — such as re-using terms, implementing common design patterns, and standardized tooling for vocabulary harmonization — semantic harmonization should vastly increase the capability of researchers to more effectively pursue their science. Thus, we are seeking to build new collaborations with domain experts from various disciplines to harmonize and further develop semantic resources relevant to their respective fields.

This session will continue ongoing discussion of the benefits, goals, and progress in semantically harmonizing Earth Science terminologies, data models and ontologies. Using actual examples integrating vocabularies from the Cryospheric domain, and with a focus on the SWEET and Environment (ENVO) Ontologies, we will present lessons learned for “good enough”/“working practices” learned during our efforts to harmonize the glacial and crosphere terminology between SWEET and ENVO. We hope that our efforts to date can inspire new collaborations and set novel harmonization activities in motion.

How to prepare for this session: For more Information see our ESIP page: https://wiki.esipfed.org/SemanticHarmonization, as well as our running meeting notes: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IFA6AsCdxESh9mZB5W1bZ_vARFkF3OvnL-KgdGNcp60/edit&sa=D&ust=1604399963101000&usg=AOvVaw0-fqz1-MEOZYXx5PsongvZ, and our ESIP summer 2020 session: https://2020esipsummermeeting.sched.com/event/cIuW/semantic-harmonization-see-it-in-action-bridging-metagenomics-and-earth-science-data.

View Recording
View Notes

Thanks to funding from the Institute of Museum & Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant, the ESIP-hosted Data Management Training Clearinghouse (DMTC) is getting ready to unveil its new user interface (UI) design and search capabilities! The home, search and submit pages are the three areas that are receiving the enhancements. Before finalizing the design, navigation and functionality of the Search page that is closest to being ready, however, the DMTC team and Advisory Board members would like to test the usability of the Search page. During this working session, ESIP Community members are invited to try out the Search page using structured usability testing procedures.  Session attendees will have options for providing feedback using different methods such as performing moderated search tasks, documenting the paths taken to fulfill specific needs, and commenting upon the results, utility, look and feel of the page.  The feedback offered by the session attendees will significantly inform final tweaks to the design of the DMTC searching functionality (and be GREATLY appreciated) before we finish our IMLS funded enhancement project in June 2021.

View Recording
View Notes

1. Overview.
2. Minecraft USG: Questions that will be posed to the audience that you may choose to prepare for.
3. Introducing our Provocateurs Steve and Arika.

1.  Overview.
This introductory tutorial provides a landscape sketch of how science and technology is incorporated in the US government through a combination of policy instruments, legal requirements, and structural constraints.  This tutorial is designed for individuals who have asked questions like “We know the science behind the increased frequency of wildfires: why isn’t our science more effectively incorporated into policy?”, "We know about the deleterious effects of certain known carcinogens in drinking water on human health: why can't do we something about it?", and “Our community has been advocating for the adoption of these technical standards for years: why can’t we accelerate standardization across the board?”  

Many of us champion paradigms like “actionable science”, “evidence-based policymaking”, "science-informed decision making", and “transdisciplinary thinking”. Making your science and technology matter by actively engaging fellow citizens, policy makers, and decision makers is undoubtedly part of the solution. However, one also needs to learn how to navigate the myriad landmarks in a complex science-technology-policy landscape so that those paradigms can be implemented through a blend of legally enforceable policy instruments, guidance documents, narratives, and messaging strategies.

This tutorial will cover topics including:  a brief history of NASA and ESIP, the structure of the US government, types of policy instruments, why science and technology are not the only drivers in policy, and a brief overview of selected US law that the ESIP community might care about.  The session will also recount how, in 2015, the ESIP Board contributed modifications to the language of a US Senate bill to promote crowdsourcing and citizen science, and how a tiny part of that language survived Congressional procedures and was ultimately signed into US law four years ago by President Obama in January 2017 just before he left office (Public Law 111-358 “America Competes Reauthorization Act of 2010”).


2. Minecraft USG: Questions that will be posed to the audience that you may choose to prepare for.
The tutorial will include a "Minecraft US Government (USG)" exercise to create a hypothetical government entity.  The exercise comprises a sli.do Q&A and breakout groups. 

• For the sli.do Q&A, you might want to think about how you would answer the following questions below:

1. What is a pressing science / technology need that would benefit from policy formulation at some level of government (federal, state, tribal)?  (Brief answer, <= 40 characters)
2. How could the need be met?  Options:  (1) A new government entity, (2) Enforceable policy to foster better coordination between existing entities, (3) Something else (Multiple choice question: select one) 
3. Further elaborate on your answer in a sentence or two.

• For your small breakout group discussion, this is the question your group will deliberate on:  "Thinking back to your answer about a pressing science/technology need:  what sort of policy instrument is required to fulfill your goal?  Why?"

3. Introducing our Provocateurs Steve and Arika.

Steve Young (Senior Business Consultant, Innovate!) and Arika Virapongse, Ph.D. (Principal Consultant, Middle Path EcoSolutions) are our Provocateurs for this tutorial. Steve is retired from the US EPA after 36 distinguished years of federal service across the USG. Arika has worked on various placed-based and virtual community challenges related to mobilization, governance, equity, and resilience. Steve and Arika have agreed to contribute their experience and perspectives by reflecting on participant responses to "Minecraft USG" and the Q&A sessions.

View Recording
View Notes

• The Power of ML and EO to Enhance Global Food Security (Hannah Kerner)
• Harnessing Small Sats and Machine Learning to Create High-Resolution, Annual Maps of Small-Scale Croplands (Lyndon Estes)
• GeoAI: Revolutionizing How We Connect to the World (Lexie Yang)

View Recording

What should we do next on Usage-based Discovery? Who should we collaborate with over the coming semester?  

We will start with some lightning talks by ESIP members whose work intersects or could intersect with Usage-based Discovery in some way:

1. Chris Lynnes: Discovery Cluster
2. Cyndi Hall: NASA Earth Science Data Pathfinders
3. Mark Parsons: Citations Cluster (PDF)
4. Mike Little / Beth Huffer: Air Quality Cluster
5. Rupu Gupta / Jonathan Blythe: Community Resilience Cluster
6. Dave Jones / Karen Moe:  Disasters Lifecycle Cluster
7. Brian Wee: Agriculture / Climate Cluster

We will follow the lightning talks with a card-sorting exercise and then a discussion about possible modes of collaboration.

View Recording
View Notes

There is a growing need among researchers, citizen scientists, and related communities for formal training in low-cost, open-source sensor technologies (e.g., Arduino, LoRa). Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic has severely limited opportunities for in-person, hands-on training. In this session, sponsored by the ESIP EnviroSensing Cluster, we will use insights and lessons learned over the past year to discuss and develop best practices for creating a web-based series of short instructional hands-on training videos covering key concepts in low-cost, open-source sensor technologies. The EnviroSensing community of practitioners promotes conversation around, and the development and refinement of techniques to observe natural Earth system processes over short and long timescales. We always welcome new perspectives and advances to the field, and we invite anyone interested in learning more about these technologies to join us (no experience necessary!).

View Recording
View Notes

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.

View Recording
View Notes

The National Geological and Geophysical Data Preservation Program (NGGDPP) works with state geological surveys and U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) bureaus to support and foster the archival of geological, geophysical, and engineering data, maps, photographs, samples, and other physical specimens. Metadata records describing these assets are managed in the National Digital Catalog (NDC). The NDC is being re-architected to provide end-to-end improvements in capabilities and services to data providers and users. The goal is to evolve an existing system in the context of many identification systems (ORCID, USGS, ROR, DOI, IGSN, …), existing tools (GeoLog Locator, ScienceBase, mdTools), metadata models (ours, ISO, mdJSON, ScienceBase, SESAR, Science on Schema.org), vocabularies (GCMD, mdTools, many others), representations, and the FAIR principles. This session will encourage representatives of many of these group to discuss how we build a thriving collaborative documentation ecosystem larger than the sum of its parts.

How to prepare for this session: Think about information you need to discover, access, use, understand and trust specimens and other items in scientific collections. Bring examples of well-documented collections that you have created or used.

View Recording
View Notes

The Research Showcase features virtual posters and recorded demos and tutorials from ESIP Meeting Attendees. You can view all contributions at any time during the meeting and leave questions or comments for the contributors. LIVE Q&A: We encourage you to attend the live Research Showcase Session (Wednesday January 27th, 6-7:30 pm ET) to chat live with contributors.

For the live event, start in the Main Room of the Research Showcase at 6 pm ET: https://qiqochat.com/breakout/0/KBNVvRiNwNjMhOeWqzzVFhGVR.

• Schema.org and Structured Data on the Web: Techniques, Issues and Opportunities (Dan Brickley)
• Building an Open Ecosystem for Dataset Discovery (Natasha Noy)

View Recording

There have been significant advances in the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) and other technologies for effectively and efficiently working with remote sensing data in the Cloud.
This session showcases some of those advancements with presentations and live demos.

AGENDA:

1:30-1:40 Welcome/Logistics (ESIP Staff, Matt Hanson)
1:40-1:55 "State of STAC" (Matt Hanson, Element 84)
1:55-2:10 "Leveraging STAC for AI for Earth"  (Rob Emanuele, Microsoft)
2:10-2:25 "Intake-STAC + NASA CMR for data management" [Google Slides] (Scott Henderson, UW E-Science Institute)
2:25-2:40 "TI Tiler: Serverless Tiling for Everyone"  (Vincent Sarago, Development Seed)
2:40-3:00 Discussion and review of key takeaways from attendees

View Recording
View Notes

Deriving scientific insights from artificial intelligence methods requires adhering to best practices and moving beyond off-the-shelf approaches” (Imme Ebert-Uphoff et al 2019). Artificial intelligence (AI) has been showing promises to address many challenges associated with Earth sciences, such as remote mapping, prediction, anomaly detection, event classification, and potentially provide high-speed, effortless alternatives for representing vague non-observable processes in Earth system models. However, due to AI's uncertainty and black box nature, there is no consensus on a universal way to correctly use AI. This session calls for best practices of AI utilization and invites the current AI practitioners to present their experiences and workflows on preparing AI-ready data, training AI models, or applying AI in real scenarios, as examples for the community to learn from. The successful use of AI in any domain of Earth and Space Sciences is welcomed for this session.

How to prepare for this session: Please refer to this repository to find out the existing efforts on AI utilization in Earth science: https://github.com/ESIPFed/Awesome-Earth-Artificial-Intelligence

TALKS

Mike Giordano
AfriqAir; Observatoire de Sciences de l'UNIVERS EFLUVE, LISA/IPSL, UMR CNRS 758; Université Paris Est Créteil et Université Paris
Title: Low-Cost Air Quality Monitoring and Machine Learning: Challenges and Lessons Learned from the AfriqAir Network
S. Mostafa Mousavi
Stanford University
Title: Earthquake Monitoring in Artificial Intelligence Era

Aji John and Nicoleta Cristea
University of Washington
Title: High-resolution snow-covered area mapping in mountain ecosystems using PlanetScope imagery
Kevin Booth
Radiant Earth
Title: Radiant MLHub: An Open Library for Geospatial Training Data

Ryan McGranaghan
ASTRA LLC
Title: The opportunities and challenges of ML: Trends from the space weather perspective
Slides: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13728070.v1

Ziheng Sun
George Mason University
Title: Earth AI: Formulating ESIP ML Community Effort
Slides: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13721521.v1

View Recording
View Notes

ESIP Information Quality Cluster (IQC) has been collaborating with national and international domain experts on a number of fronts that are associated with representing data quality information in a consistent way, ranging from capturing data uncertainty information in NetCDF file-level metadata, providing IQC perspectives on citizen science data, and developing community guidelines for curating FAIR dataset quality information. Doing so will not only improve the maturity of underlying data, but also help enable the sharing of both data and quality information. Community adoption of practices for improving data quality information also will offer new opportunities for users to determine whether data products and services can be used for particular purposes and foster the use of such data.

In this session, we will share with the ESIP community on the current status of those efforts and obtain feedback from the community.

View Recording
View Notes

The Community Data Cluster has been working to develop a process for tackling environmental and social problems with our special blend of ESIP data-y skills.  This year, we're focusing on the water crisis in Flint, MI as our case study.  In our Summer 2020 meeting, we held a Do-a-thon where we split into groups to rapidly complete a landscape analysis outlining the scope of the problem.  In this session, we want to start ideating on ways we as ESIP-ers might be able to help!

In the first half of this session, we'll split participants into groups to identify data gaps related to water quality and environmental justice in Flint, MI. What data was collected, but is inaccessible? What data was never collected? What data are community members asking for, but can't use? In the second half of the session, breakouts will report out to the full group, and we'll ideate together around ways that ESIP might be able to build resource, curate data, or otherwise help bridge these gaps.

The goal of this session is to plant seeds that we can further tackle through Community Data Cluster Meetings, and in the Summer 2021 ESIP meeting, where we plant to hold a (hopefully all-day, hopefully in-person) hackathon where we start actually building some of these resources, tools, data sets, and whatever else we coalesce around. We also hope to eventually publish on this whole workflow, in which we move from do-a-thons to ideation to hack-a-thons, as a path others interested in effecting data-driven change can walk.

All are welcome to this session! We merely ask that you come ready to Do Stuff, and with a positive, collaborative attitude.

How to prepare for this session: not required, but you may wish to attend the Community Data Cluster Telecon on 1/13. Find info on the ESIP Telecon Calendar.

View Recording
View Notes

Overview:
The Biden plan for a “Clean Energy revolution and environmental justice” includes the objective “decarbonizing the food and agriculture sector, and leveraging agriculture to remove carbon dioxide from the air and store it in the ground”. This session will focus on science, technology, and policy relevant to that objective, selected UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a private sector approach for low-carbon grain, and the science that researchers bring to inform policy and decisions.

How to prepare for this session:
During the session, attendees will be introduced to a high-level concept map that provides a landscape overview of the concepts that will be addressed in the session. That concept map will be incrementally evolved as each of our invited speakers present their materials. At the end of the presentations, attendees will be assigned small breakout groups to continue evolving the concept map.  You are strongly encouraged to familiarize yourself with the "seed" concept map before the session.

Details:
The Agriculture and Climate Cluster (ACC) has recently focused on science and technology topics that wrap around the transdisciplinary pipeline connecting data to decisions. This fall, the Cluster organized a do-a-thon to semantically tag selected SDG targets, and are planning further joint activities with the Research Data Alliance’s SDG Interest Group (the RDA SDG IG). The SDGs are a useful conceptual vehicle to place into context US climate actions. 

Our guest speakers are: 

• Linsday Barbieri, University of Vermont 
• Todd Walter, Cornell University
• Steele Lorenz, Farmers Business Network

In this session, three speakers will present a blend of science, technology, and policy topics relevant to the Biden plan objectives and the SDGs.  As the session unfolds, we shall be using a gradually evolving concept map to highlight relevant concepts mentioned by our invited speakers.  After the talks, attendees will be assigned to breakout groups.  Your task is to annotate the concept map by indicating concepts that you think are missing, how your own work may relate to the points discussed, or what you wish to see discussed in ACC monthly meetings.

Even more details:
You may wish to take a look at this machine-generated concept graph prior to the meeting.  The concept graph provides an idea of how we have experimented with a graph database to visualize the connections between various concepts and documents.  The topics covered in this session will be largely congruent to the topics highlighted in the concept graph.  Due to time constraints, we shall not be able to discuss this machine-generated version: instead, we shall collectively work on a concept map, as described above.

About the Agriculture and Climate Cluster: 
The Agriculture and Climate Cluster’s Wiki page has a complete provenance of our activities, including meeting minutes, links to meeting recordings, presentations, etc. The Wiki page is at: https://wiki.esipfed.org/Agriculture_and_Climate.

View Recording
View Notes

Open-source frameworks, tools and workflows are continuing to show the effectiveness of scalable computing on cloud-optimized data.   This session will showcase recent advances and successes surrounding processing, access and visualization of earth science data through live demos. 

AGENDA:

4:00-4:10 Welcome/Logistics (ESIP Staff, Rich Signell)
4:10-4:25 "Hybrid Cloud Supports Crowd Sourced Bathymetry Data Distribution and Access" (Dave Neufeld, NOAA)
4:25-4:40 "QHub: Deploy JupyterHub with Dask Gateway on Kubernetes in 15 minutes" (Tyler Potts, QuanSight)
4:40-4:55 "Announcing .interactive(): Easy Apps for Xarray" (Jim Bednar, Anaconda)
4:55-5:10 "Working with Cloud-Based NASA Earth Observations Data and Tools” (Amy Steiker, NSIDC and Catalina Oaida, NASA)
5:10-5:30 Discussion and review of key takeaways from attendees

View Recording
View Notes

Increasing effort is being directed toward streamlining the activities surrounding research data publication. Yet, we still do not have a complete understanding of the full data publication process, including the requirements and workflows of individual stakeholders, and the touch points between them. Reaching consensus on stakeholder needs and processes is a first step in addressing challenges associated with data sharing, management, publication and citation, and in better aligning these workflows to facilitate Open Science.

This session seeks to engage all stakeholders involved in the data publication process to help articulate and document the workflow(s) between the geoscience researcher, repository, and publisher; to identify inherent challenges in these existing workflow(s); and to collaboratively develop and recommend strategies for solutions to these challenges. We welcome and encourage all stakeholders in the data publication landscape to participate. Initial outcomes of the RDA Plenary 16 Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences Interest Group’s session on this topic will be presented for discussion and refinement. This session is relevant to the ESIP Collaboration Areas for COPDESS, Data Stewardship, Discovery, and Research Object Citation.

How to prepare for this session: consider your own particular stakeholder's experiences in the data publication workflow.

Quick link to session agenda

View Recording
View Notes

This session offers a hands-on working agenda for SWEET community members.

Audience
In order to focus on work items, this session targets people who are already familiar with the SWEET ontology. This session will NOT provide an introduction to ontology engineering or the semantic technologies ecosystem.
 

 Preparation
Prior to the session we will have prioritized a handful of Github issues we want to work through. Issues should be labeled with #esipwinter2021To align with the ESIP Meeting theme 'Leading Innovation in Earth Science Data Frontiers', issues focusing on INTEROPERABILITY will be prioritized. Please feel free to create issues and label them appropriately.

Agenda Introduce the session structure Est. time: 5
Landform introduction (Gary Berg-Cross) Est. time: 5
Part 1 - Prioritizing SWEET work

Slido poll #1 Which open Github issue is most important to you? Est. time: 5 min
BREAKOUT #1 Vote with your feet. Join the breakout of interest. Est. time: ~10 min
FEEDBACK #1 - Breakout representative briefs larger group on breakout outcomes; allow time for comments from broader group Est. time: 15-20 min
Part 2 - SWEET Community and Project Governance

Slido poll #2 Which community and/or project governance issues are of concern to you? Est. time: 5 min
BREAKOUT #2 VOTE with your feet. Join breakout of interest. Est. time: ~10 min
FEEDBACK #2 - Breakout representative briefs larger group on breakout outcomes; allow time for comments from broader group Est. time: 15-20 min
SURVEY FEEDBACK/CONCLUSION – Brandon provides commentary of the SWEET survey responses so far. Est time: ~5-10 min

Outcomes

1. We will have identied community governance issues and built consensus on how to address them. Decisions will be recorded in the Github issue - [GOVERNANCE] Project and Community Governance Issues.
2. We will have strategized solutions for current development activities. These will be documented in Github. Maybe even grouped and prioritized as a Github project.

View Recording
View Notes

ESIP has published guidelines for citing data and for citing software and services. These have been important and influential ESIP products. Now, the Research Artifact Citation Cluster is working to address the issues of “research artifact” citation writ large. The cluster has been working to identify additional types of research artifacts that could or should be cited such as samples, taxonomies, annotations, and other artifacts. We have also been examining the various concerns that may be addressed in citing the objects such as access, credit or attribution, and scientific reproducibility.

Currently, we are focusing on the credit aspect of citation for five different artifact types: data, software, samples, semantic resources, and learning resources. At the previous ESIP meeting, we began to explore whether and how the Contribution Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) might apply to different artifacts. In this session we will explore what roles are missing and whether we can begin to generalize credit mechanisms for multiple artifacts or classes of artifacts.

We will present the current work of the cluster on defining the roles and their importance for the different artifacts and then facilitate a group brainstorming exercise on relevant roles and their importance in different use cases.

How to prepare for this session: Participants should be familiar with ESIP Data Citation Guidelines and the ESIP Software & Services Citation Guidelines and ideally the cluster's last session at the 2020 ESIP Summer Meeting.

View Recording
View Notes

Biological data represent a unique informatics challenge but researchers around the world are developing innovative methods for linking biological data, making biological data accessible, standardizing, and sharing biological data. In this breakout session we will provide a look at several projects with innovative approaches to informatics challenges related to biological data and showcase the power of open science principles and emerging observation methods. We will also highlight the role that standards play in making all this possible.

Nicole Kearney: How the biodiversity community are making historic literature discoverable online
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest online repository of biodiversity literature and archival materials. It is a global consortium of 500 libraries who have made over 59 million pages from their collections freely accessible online. Yet accessible does not equate to discoverable. Unlike contemporary scientific papers, the historical literature was not “born” with digital object identifiers (DOIs). This means historic articles sit outside the convenient linked infrastructure of modern publications, appearing in today’s reference lists as unlinked citations or not at all. The upshot of this is that our historic literature is falling into obscurity. This paper will detail the work the BHL is undertaking to bring the world’s historic literature into the modern linked network of scholarly research. It will also discuss the responsibility that comes with assigning DOIs retrospectively, what we are doing to promote best practice for out-of-copyright and orphaned content, and how DOIs are demonstrating that the historic literature is still hugely relevant today.     

Marie-Elise Lecoq: The Living Atlases Community
The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) has worked on a modular and open-source platform that provides information on all known species in Australia and contributes to the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility). Its modular and open-source architecture enables other institutions to re-use and modify the ALA platform for their thematics or national data portals. For several years, GBIF nodes and institutions have worked together to create an open-source community, named the Living Atlases community, around the ALA software. Today, we have more than 25 live data portals around the world based on the ALA framework.  For two years, we have endeavoured to make this community more sustainable. First, we have organized a Community of Practice based on existing foundations such as the Apache or Linux communities. In addition, we have hired a technical coordinator and an administrative one that helped grow the community via better technical documentation on installing, maintaining data portals, and contributing to the main project. We have also developed tools that facilitate the installation and configuration of a Living Atlas data portal.
Nicky Nicolson: Specimen duplicate detection in aggregated biodiversity data
Plant specimens are considered easy to digitise, but they are often duplicated between separate institutions and duplicate specimens are independently curated and digitised. When these data are aggregated together into data portals, the duplicates are hidden. As the field values in these records may vary due to separate curation histories, these are not absolute (record-for-record) duplicates and it is necessary to use data-mining techniques for detection.
The GBIF network (www.gbif.org) mobilises c85 million records for plant specimens - this number will include many duplicated specimens. This talk outlines an automated process applied to GBIF mobilised data which identifies field collectors and their collecting activities (expeditions) and enables the detection of specimen duplicate sets. Resolution of these duplicates enables the sharing of curatorial information between separate institutions. A higher-level collector-oriented view of the specimens also helps users understand and summarise a collection. The process is enabled by data standards for specimen metadata sharing and has implications for data standards development in collection description efforts.
Curtis Dyreson & Neil Cobb: Symbiota2: Promoting FAIRness in biodiversity databases and developing “Extended Specimen” pathways
This talk discusses data management standards and practices in Symbiota2 from the values stored in a database to values in a knowledge graph.  Symbiota2 a biodiversity collection management system that is a rewrite of Symbiota, one of the most popular biodiversity database applications.  Symbiota2 is primarily used to store and manage specimen collection data. Data in Symbiota2 is stored and managed by a relational database.  Some of the data can be exported formatted to the Darwin Core standard for integration with other datasets.  Symbiota2 also provides web services to interact with the data at a more abstract level, documented using the OpenAPI standard.  Finally, Symbiota2 produces a knowledge graph using the R2RML standard. An emerging focus will be to accommodate data created as part of the “Extended Specimen” phase of US collection digitization (e.g., genetics, traits, phylogenetics) and integrate specimen-based data with environmental data.
Megan Cromwell: Video Data Solutions: Standard Biological Data Quantification and Data Accessibility with Machine Learning Techniques
Video data are qualitative data that are time consuming to analyze, standardize, and archive in a user friendly manner. Over the last 12 years, the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Data Management has collaborated with the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research and their partners to systematically work through many of these challenges. We have learned that standard annotations offer a key to finding and reusing these data for scientific analysis. Machine Learning techniques are opening the doorway for annotating these data without the heavy human time commitment typically required. Partners from NOAA, Academia and non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)have begun developing annotation methodologies through student crowd-sourced projects that will eventually resolve the many challenges associated with biological imagery annotation, for the benefit of data access and reuse.

View Recording
View Notes

California experienced its largest wildfire season on record in 2020 with a single wildfire burning more than 1 million acres. Data has been crucial to inform decision makers and innovation is being applied. This session will dive into the public-private benefits of putting trusted data to work as we tie into the ESIP theme of ‘Leading Innovation in Earth Science Frontiers’. The California Wildfires of 2020 demonstrated that disasters can be on-going and multi-dimensional with COVID-19, evacuations, and destroyed towns. We will discuss key trusted data needs and identify additional opportunities for data applications in support of life saving operations. How can coordination and data sharing accelerate public-private situational awareness and decision making? Are there steps that agencies could take to successfully share their data with decision makers and the public? Your participation can guide us in the Disaster Lifecycle Cluster for the next 6 months. Come join us!

Presentations have been uploaded and are available. If the PPT was larger than 50MB it has been converted to a PDF document.

View Recording
View Notes

Session Description: Artificial intelligence (AI) is a leading technology that may transform the research and applications of Earth and space science and amplify the benefits to society. One of the key bottlenecks limiting exploring/applying AI in Earth and space sciences at scale is the lack of analysis-ready data for AI applications. It's often cited that researchers can spend 80% of their project time wrangling with the large heterogeneous volumes of data that are needed for the application. To accelerate the application of AI in Earth and space sciences, it is essential to minimize users’ burden of data wrangling by providing AI-ready data with machine-readable metadata that is not only compliant with FAIR principles but also tuned for AI applications (e.g., data biases). In this session, we will convene a panel of stakeholders from data providers, users, and data engineers to discuss the path of defining the requirements and creating inter-organization matrices to assess and describe data “AI-readiness”. The outcome of this session will be summarized in a short report, and the document will be used as a guiding document to pursue further collaboration across Earth and space science data communities on this topic.

Session Agenda:

1. Session Scope (5 min)
2. Establish A Baseline (5 min)
3. Invited Presentations (Gregory Dusek, Kirstine Dale, Sophie Hou) (25 min)
4. Breakout Discussion (35 min)
5. Setting Community-Driven Priority (15 min)
6. Close & Depart (5 min)

Slides & Relevant Documents:

• Data AI-readiness matrix (presented during 2nd NOAA AI Workshop).
• Session slide deck
• All slides from speakers can be found at the bottom of this page.

Relevant Sessions:

• Analysis Ready Data in Science and Industry (01/27 11:00 am -12:30 pm)
• Best Practices and Fundamental Challenges of AI in Earth and Space Sciences (01/28 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm)
• Research Showcase (01/27 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm)

View Recording
View Notes

SLIDES: Google Slides

The science-on-schema.org guidelines have been a useful resource for guiding data repositories on how to publish metadata embedded in web pages for describing scientific datasets on the web. Following these guidelines helps repositories ensure they are correctly publishing common, shared metadata information in ways that are known to major search engines and metadata aggregators. The Schema.org Cluster is seeking to have guidelines for simple data discovery endorsed by the ESIP Assembly, and this session will address/cover:
1. Brief introduction to the Science-on-Schema.org guidelines & the Schema.org ESIP Cluster
2. Review/announce the latest version of the guidelines (v1.2)
3. Why obtaining an ESIP Assembly endorsement is a worthwhile/meaningful activity;
4. Review the ESIP Assembly submission guidelines
5. Develop a roadmap for the Science-on-Schema.org guidelines for ESIP Assembly review

How to prepare for this session:

1. Review the Science-on-Schema.org guidelines at https://science-on-schema.org. 
2. Review the ESIP Endorsement Policy
   https://github.com/ESIPFed/Governance/blob/master/ESIP%20Policies%20and%20Procedures/1.0%20Corporate/ESIP%20P%26P%201.7%20Endorsements.md.
   

View Recording
View Notes

View Recording