From research data workflows to digital Earth models: continuing efforts to integrate the geoinformatics data ecosystem for the future

Session: Transforming Earth and Planetary Science Through Data and Data Management: In Honor of MSA Distinguished Public Service Medal Awardee, Kerstin Lehnert

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In recent decades, geoscientists have made impressive strides in collecting, curating, and maintaining digital archives of research data. Over her career, Dr. Kerstin Lehnert's leadership has been instrumental to the development of facilities that comprise a substantial part of the digital architecture Earth science (e.g., EarthChem, PetDB, the Astromaterials Data System, SESAR, and IEDA). She has led the geoinformatics community to prioritize data stewardship and knit together new collaborative networks across disciplines of Earth systems research. Here, I discuss the continuation of Dr. Lehnert's work to create a data-driven research ecosystem, along several themes:

1. Geoscience data often includes complex domain-specific requirements. Creating digital data archives that retain the fidelity of their original scientific purpose requires participation of domain researchers and digitization early in the research workflow. The goals of data completeness and quality for downstream users must be balanced with support for existing workflows and the incentives of data producers. 2. As data volume and complexity increases, insights become more difficult to derive. Software must increasingly synthesize information to allow connections across scientific domain boundaries. Ideally, the expertise of many subfields would contribute to new insights about the Earth system, summarized for use by geoscientists and other stakeholders (e.g., commercial data users and the general public). 3. A vibrant geoinformatics community must remain responsive to geoscience needs while resisting fragmentation along domain boundaries. This requires development of shared infrastructure such as ongoing links between data providers, collaborative maintenance of scientific software, and new training approaches to develop strong digital skills among the Earth science workforce.

Responding to these challenges will require sustained attention over the coming decades. But success promises to expand and integrate the digital infrastructure of Earth science from today's ecosystem of trusted data repositories towards a future of integrated multi-domain Earth system models. Dr. Lehnert's foundational contributions challenge us to act expansively to secure this future.