Published on 27 April 2022

The NERC Environmental Data Service (EDS) has recently completed a successful webinar series, run in collaboration with the NERC Constructing a Digital Environment program. Each webinar was recorded and is freely available on our website 

Our webinar series focused on research data management and the analytical tools available to support researchers in the environmental sciences. The series showcased the services provided by the EDS and illustrated how we support the open data agenda; describing how our tools enable interoperability, support large-scale data analysis and facilitate multi- and trans-disciplinary research. 

The series attracted a global audience, with nearly 300 participants from the UK as well as countries such as the USA, Ghana and China. Attendees were predominantly from UK universities and UKRI institutes, but government agencies and private businesses were also represented. 

Professor Stephen Hallett, Cranfield University describes what he got out of the webinar series:

"As one of the Digital Environment Champions of the ‘Constructing a Digital Environment’ programme, I have been particularly keen to watch our webinar programme develop and expand. I was therefore delighted when the opportunity arose to join up with the NERC Environmental Data Service (EDS) to organise a whole webinar series. We were fortunate to have five excellent and most informative talks about the recent developments and offerings of EDS, with the talks proving popular both to immediate attendees, but also to those then accessing the recorded presentations subsequently.  

The webinars included a discussion by Jaana Pinnick around data management plans, metadata and roadmapping research projects. Helen Glaves then provided a fascinating discussion around the Open Science Framework and advice on selecting and implementing data identifiers. Ag Stephen’s talk revealed the amazing JASMIN HPC service available to all NERC researchers, with some great examples and advice about how best to access this resource. With an interest in ontologies and linked data, Gwen Moncoiffe and Alexandra Kokkinaki’s talk about the NERC Vocab Server and how data annotation can be used in practice was a particular highlight; the technical walkthrough they provided was really useful. Lastly, Michael Hollaway, Tom August and Michael Tso spoke about the exciting ‘DataLabs’ development and used some fantastic case studies to show the full power of this set of tools for supporting digital environmental science, with its provision of data access and the Jupyter notebook development environment.  

We were fortunate to have five excellent and most informative talks about the recent developments and offerings of EDS, with the talks proving popular both to immediate attendees, but also to those then accessing the recorded presentations subsequently. 

Overall, the talks provided a timely snapshot of the EDS services and developments and provided our audiences with an excellent addition to the CDE webinar series."

You can find full recordings of each of the webinars on our Events page or click below to navigate directly to a webinar of interest: