2025 January ESIP Meeting: Full Schedule

We are a home for Earth science data and computing professionals. Our sessions bring together the community for hands-on, interdisciplinary deep dives as we explore "Innovation to Impact" this year. Learn more about ESIP: esipfed.org

1:30pm EST

A Town Hall with the new Data Sovereignty Cluster

Tuesday January 21, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST

Room 2

The Sustainable Data Management Cluster is transitioning into the Data Sovereignty Cluster following on the work of the past few years culminating in the recent CARE principles paper (https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2024-037). While the current Sustainable Data Management Cluster will go dormant the new Data Sovereignty Cluster is looking for new faces and ideas and would like to hear from you on your interests and questions related to data sovereignty.

Value to Session Participants: Awareness of the cluster, interest in potential paths by the Data Sovereignty Cluster

Recommended Ways to Prepare: Reading about data sovereignty/indigenous data, realizing that data sovereignty is not only indigenous data

Speakers

Carolina Berys-Gonzalez

Laura Brenskelle

Joseph Gum

Data Stewardship Coordinator, NSF NCAR

Tuesday January 21, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST
Room 2

Breakout, Breakout

Session Track Tags Data Stewardship
Session Level No prior knowledge or experience - the session skims the surface or is an introduction

1:30pm EST

Championing User Needs during ESDIS Evolution

Tuesday January 21, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST

Room 3

NASA’s ESDIS program manages the Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs), data repositories that process, archive, document and distribute science data from NASA's past and current Earth-observing satellites and field measurement programs. Although DAACs have historically focused on the unique needs of their discipline communities, current efforts at ESDIS focus on providing the excellent level of service that DAACs provide to all users through enterprise and cross-DAAC collaborative efforts that will shape the evolution of a unified system that meets the needs of all users of NASA Earth observation data through shared standards, a shared website and common tools. While these efforts require engineering expertise, it is also important that the needs of science and applied science users are taken into account during development. This session will describe efforts currently underway at ESDIS to ensure that user needs and user experience are considered during ESDIS evolution while protecting both ESDIS’s high standards and the trust of the scientific community.

Value to Session Participants: We want participants to have a better idea of what is happening at ESDIS and how they might provide feedback.

Recommended Ways to Prepare: Look at the new Earthdata

Speakers

Ross Bagwell

Sandra Cosic

Danielle Golon

Jenny Hewson

Frank Lindsay

Sara Lubkin

Tammy Walker

Tuesday January 21, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST
Room 3

Breakout, Breakout

Session Track Tags Data Stewardship
Session Level No prior knowledge or experience - the session skims the surface or is an introduction

1:30pm EST

Context Matters: Refining AI-Readiness Checklist for Geoscience Use Cases

Tuesday January 21, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST

Room 1

ESIP Data Readiness Cluster is exploring to expand the current AI-readiness checklist (https://github.com/esipfed/data-readiness) by better supporting diverse geoscience use cases. The current AI-readiness checklist provides general guidelines for data producers and data managers to evaluate the quality and usability of open environmental data for AI developments. However, different AI use cases in geosciences may have further requirements for datasets that are suitable for efficient and reproducible AI research and development. This session will focus on the development of extensions of AI-readiness checklist for different types of geoscience datasets.

Value to Session Participants: Session participants can contribute to the development and provide feedback to the AI-readiness checklist.

Recommended Ways to Prepare: Getting familiar with the AI-readiness checklist from ESIP Data Readiness Cluster.

Speakers

Yuhan "Douglas" Rao

Research Scientist, CISESS-NC/NOAA NCEI

I am currently a Research Scientist at North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, affiliated with NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. My current research at NCICS focuses on generating a blended near-surface air temperature dataset by integrating in situ measurements... Read More →

Tuesday January 21, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST
Room 1

Breakout, Breakout

Session Track Tags Data Stewardship, Machine Learning
Session Level Some prior knowledge – the session will jump right into an intermediate level

1:30pm EST

Enhancing reproducible scientific workflows with the R ‘targets’ package

Tuesday January 21, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST

Room 4

Writing code has become an integral component of conducting scientific research, especially as datasets size and complexity have grown. Scientists use code to download and clean data, prepare visualizations, calculate statistics, run models, and more. Just as the use of code in environmental research has grown, so has the ecosystem of tools and techniques for building robust analyses. Libraries in the programming language R have expanded to meet the needs of a growing user base in the scientific community, particularly through the open science community, rOpenSci. In this session, we will focus on a particular package in the rOpenSci ecosystem called ‘targets’, which enables users to build robust, data pipelines that enable reproducible and efficient scientific workflows. We will introduce the concepts of dependency tracking that underpin the package, host an interactive demo to build a small pipeline using ‘targets’, and share a few examples of ‘targets’ pipelines built for large research projects. Attendees should leave this session feeling inspired and equipped to begin constructing data pipelines using ‘targets’ for their own projects.

Value to Session Participants: Session participants will leave with an example of a reproducible workflow, and practice writing and running code with dependency management enabled. This should give them a starting point for future projects that can leverage these techniques.

Recommended Ways to Prepare: Skim the homepage of the ‘targets’ rOpenSci docs to understand the high-level summary and philosophy of this approach at https://docs.ropensci.org/targets/. Consider watching the 4-minute demonstration video that shows an example workflow. If you are not familiar with R functions, please read about them in this R for Data Science chapter at https://r4ds.hadley.nz/functions.html.

Speakers

Lindsay Platt

Tuesday January 21, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST
Room 4

Breakout, Breakout

Session Track Tags Data Stewardship, Education
Session Level Some prior knowledge AND a quick review of supporting materials before the session will be a sufficient orientation for novices to feel more comfortable in the session

4:00pm EST

Next Paper Idea for Realizing Practical Earth AI

Tuesday January 21, 2025 4:00pm - 5:30pm EST

Room 5

We will talk on a range of ideas centering on data, AI models, and AI product life cycles. We will determine what we should do next to help community realize practical, trustworthy, and ethical AI.

Value to Session Participants: Clear the mind on what AI projects should be carried out, participate to draft the community paper, be part of the big effort on navigating AI efforts in Earth Science Data community.

Recommended Ways to Prepare: Read the AI readiness checklist and the meeting notes of machine learning cluster.

Speakers

Ziheng Sun

Research Associate Prof, George Mason University

My research interests are mainly on geospatial cyberinfrastructure and machine learning in atmospheric and agricultural sciences.

Tuesday January 21, 2025 4:00pm - 5:30pm EST
Room 5

Breakout, Breakout

Session Track Tags Machine Learning, Metadata, Data Stewardship
Other Keywords Data Quality, AI Readiness
Session Level Some prior knowledge – the session will jump right into an intermediate level

4:00pm EST

Using GitHub for Collaborative Review of the Biological Data Primer Guidelines

Tuesday January 21, 2025 4:00pm - 5:30pm EST

Room 6

The Biological Data Standards Cluster has created accompanying guidelines to the Biological Data Standards Primer that provide more context and details for data managers. The goal of these guidelines is to bridge the gap between the Primer and the full, lengthy standards documentation, by giving the information necessary to help data managers decide which standards should be used for the biological data they are working with. Currently these guides are stored in a repository in the ESIP GitHub. Interacting with, or contributing to, the GitHub repository might not be intuitive or standard practice for all users of the guidelines. In this session, we will introduce some GitHub basics for users, and using GitHub as a tool, we want to encourage the ESIP community to provide structured feedback and ensure the guidelines are accurate and aligned with current standards for biological data.

Value to Session Participants: For those newer to GitHub, this session will provide an environment to learn how to make a fork, submit a pull request, and submit issues.

Recommended Ways to Prepare: Review the Biological Data Standards Primer

Speakers

Kyla Richards

Physical Scientist, U.S. Geological Survey

Tim van der Stap

Scientific Data Specialist, Hakai Institute

Laura Brenskelle

Steve Formel

Tuesday January 21, 2025 4:00pm - 5:30pm EST
Room 6

Breakout, Breakout

Session Track Tags Data Stewardship
Other Keywords Biological Data Standards
Session Level No prior knowledge or experience - the session skims the surface or is an introduction

1:30pm EST

Enabling Connections among Persistent Identifiers (PIDs)

Wednesday January 22, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST

Room 5

Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) are being assigned to many types of entities in the research ecosystem, including for people, organizations, datasets, software, instruments, facilities, projects, samples, and others. As PIDs proliferate, new questions and challenges arise, including how to establish connections between PIDs for related resources. Examples of possible connections include how datasets and software are produced by people and organizations. Likewise, people use instruments and facilities, which use software and produce data. Similarly, organizations manage projects, data, facilities, and people. In short, the types of connections and relationships among PIDs range widely, and vary considerably depending on many factors.

This session will explore approaches to establishing, managing, and leveraging relationships among PIDs. The goal will be to facilitate discussion within the ESIP community about PID-to-PID relationships.

Speakers will include:

Matt Mayernik - NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research
Topic - Connecting datasets to underlying research resources like software, instruments, and facilities.

Ted Habermann - Metadata Game Changers
Topic - Describing relationships between PIDs via metadata.

Madison Langseth - US Geological Survey
Topic - USGS approach for leveraging people and organization identifiers in DOIs metadata.

Shelley Stall - American Geophysical Union
Topic - Update on work in the RDA Complex Citation group, which is working on recommendations for citing a large number of existing objects (e.g., datasets, software, or physical samples) in a way that allows credit for individual objects to be properly assigned.

Value to Session Participants: We hope that the participants will learn about new efforts to connect PIDs, and will get ideas about how they might pursue this work within their own organizations.

Recommended Ways to Prepare: Participants would benefit from reviewing the ESIP data citation guidelines if they are not familiar with this document.

Speakers

Matthew Mayernik

Project Scientist, NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research

Matt is a Project Scientist and Research Data Services Specialist in the NCAR/UCAR Library. His work is focused on research and service development related to research data curation. His research interests include metadata practices and standards, data curation education, data citation... Read More →

Ted Habermann

CTO, Metadata Game Changers

I am CTO of Metadata Game Changers (https://metadatagamechangers.com/) interested in metadata evaluation and improvement, repository re-curation, PIDs for everything...

Madison Langseth

Science Data Manager, U.S. Geological Survey

Madison develops tools and workflows to make the USGS data release process more efficient for researchers and data managers. She also promotes data management best practices through the USGS’s Community for Data Integration Data Management Working Group and the USGS Data Management... Read More →

Shelley Stall

Vice President, Open Science Leadership, American Geophysical Union

Shelley Stall is the Vice President of the American Geophysical Union’s Open Science Leadership Program. She works with AGU’s members, their organizations, and the broader research community to improve data and digital object practices with the ultimate goal of elevating how research... Read More →

Wednesday January 22, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST
Room 5

Breakout, Breakout

Session Track Tags Data Stewardship, Metadata
Session Level Some prior knowledge – the session will jump right into an intermediate level

1:30pm EST

Operational Data Science for Wildfire Resilience

Thursday January 23, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST

Room 2

The ESIP Wildfire cluster would like to invite data practitioners that are working to create hazard mitigation activities that involve trusted data and AI that can be leveraged to inform communities and demonstrate best practices that are user centered. Wildfires can happen anywhere as we have seen in New Jersey and New York. We want to build situational awareness and collaboration opportunities with emerging and established organizations and people in the wildfire space. The conversation starts here and continues during our monthly meetings so we can bring Innovations to Impact.

This session will focus on innovative data services that are improving wildfire outcomes. Over the last decade there has been a significant investment in data products to support wildfire resilience efforts. Wildfire resilience is achieved through efficient actions in prefire hazard mitigation, incident response, and post fire environmental management. Each of these phases has a distinct set of user stories.There is a need to disseminate operational knowledge to broader communities of interest including fire practitioners and the public at large. Creating shared, actionable situational awareness based on trusted sources will help communities prepare for emerging fire management challenges.

Value to Session Participants: Session participants will get perspective on the user centered design approach that several leading wildfire decision support data services have taken.

Recommended Ways to Prepare:

Speakers

Dave Jones

CEO, StormCenter Communications

GeoCollaborate, is an SBIR Phase III technology (Yes, its a big deal) that enables real-time data access through web services, sharing and collaboration across multiple platforms. We call GeoCollaborate a 'Collaborative Common Operating Picture' that empowers decision making, situational... Read More →

Yuhan "Douglas" Rao

Research Scientist, CISESS-NC/NOAA NCEI

Tim Bailey

Thursday January 23, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST
Room 2

Breakout, Breakout

Session Track Tags Data Stewardship, Science Communication
Other Keywords Wildfire, Resilience, Adaptation
Session Level No prior knowledge or experience - the session skims the surface or is an introduction

1:30pm EST

Stories of governance and open science culture change in government

Thursday January 23, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST

Room 3

“The tech challenges are the easy part, it’s the people and culture part that are hard” - quote from many speakers at many past ESIP sessions.

This session will focus on a main story, GitHub Governance at NOAA Fisheries. We will hear from different people involved in this story, which involved finding each other, creating the luck, getting to the table, building the trust, and ultimately rolling out GitHub access for research staff across NOAA Fisheries. We will then have a structured discussion with participants to ask questions, share other stories, with an aim to help document this story as one that we can “fork” to new places and situations.

Value to Session Participants: Not feeling alone. Developing language and stories to point to to describe what is possible and how we can work to change hard things.

Recommended Ways to Prepare: https://nmfs-openscapes.github.io/#what-is-the-impact-of-this

Speakers

Eli Holmes

NMFS Open Science lead, NOAA Fisheries

I have been involved in the Open Science movement for many years. I am currently involved in activities for the 2023 Year of Open Science in my role as lead of NMFS Open Science, co-lead of the Inter-agency R User Group (federal agencies) and NMFS Openscapes. Since 2020, I have helped Openscapes lead Open Science team trainings at NOAA Fisheries across all our science centers and involving 300+ staff. Since 2018, I have also been involved in teaching data science in India with the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services... Read More →

Julia Lowndes

Lead, Openscapes

Dr. Julia Stewart Lowndes is Openscapes founding director and co-leads the NASA Openscapes project. I am a marine ecologist working at the intersection of actionable environmental science, data science, and open science, having earned my PhD from Stanford University in 2012 studying... Read More →

Thursday January 23, 2025 1:30pm - 3:00pm EST
Room 3

Breakout, Breakout

Session Track Tags Cloud Computing, Data Stewardship, Science Communication
Other Keywords movement building
Session Level No prior knowledge or experience - the session skims the surface or is an introduction

4:00pm EST

Federal data strategies: How can Federal agencies harness partnerships and innovation to maximize the impact of Earth science data resources?

Thursday January 23, 2025 4:00pm - 5:30pm EST

Room 6

This session will be a venue for federal agencies to share ideas for partnerships and innovative development approaches that maximize the impact of investments in Earth science data resources. A continuation of July 2023 and January 2024 sessions on Federal Data Strategies, it will feature federal agency presentations highlighting emerging opportunities for partnership and innovation, following by discussion on the ESIP theme of Innovation to Impact.

Topics to be addressed by a panel of Federal agency representatives will include:

• How do agency missions drive investments in Earth science data resources, and what are potential intersections?
• How can we improve coordination among agencies in terms of how we are investing in data management resources to maximize impact?
• What are innovative approaches to leverage existing Federal data investments to expand cross-sector impacts?

ESIP is a logical venue for agencies to come together, collaborate, and reduce duplication of effort in the prioritization of their Earth Science data investments.

Value to Session Participants: People with a role in federally supported resources for Earth science data will be able to see what other agencies are doing. Users of federal data will understand how agency activities will influence their access to the data.

Recommended Ways to Prepare: The materials from the previous sessions can be viewed. There are three previous sessions on Data Strategies and a compilation doc which we will compile in preparation.

Speakers

Leslie Hsu

physical scientist, U.S. Geological Survey

Coordinator of the USGS Community for Data Integration and member of the USGS Science Data Management branch.

Raleigh Martin

Program Director, National Science Foundation

Thursday January 23, 2025 4:00pm - 5:30pm EST
Room 6

Breakout, Breakout

Session Track Tags Data Stewardship, Federal agencies
Other Keywords data policy, data strategies, research science data, partnerships
Session Level Some prior knowledge – the session will jump right into an intermediate level

11:00am EST

Indigenous Data FUNding Friday Project

Friday January 24, 2025 11:00am - 12:30pm EST

Room 2

Building on the Indigenous Data FUNding Friday project we plan to present on the methods and questions around indigenous data management needs with focus groups of communities that interact with indigenous groups. These focus groups include state and federal agency members, researchers at academic institutions, and indigenous non-profits.

By conducting conversations with liaison groups that work with numerous tribes, to understand scientific data management and cyberinfrastructure needs within tribes in order to:
- Helping tribes promote data sovereignty
- Compile existing data management training materials including technologies used that may help address knowledge gaps.
- Identify subjects that are lacking training materials so they can be developed by ESIP and/or other appropriate communities.
- Identify and share educational pathways that data managers in the ESIP community have taken
- Co-produce and share this information with tribes to help them better advocate for the cyberinfrastructure and funding necessary to advance their own data sovereignty.

Our goal with this session is to get feedback from the ESIP community including people of color, minority communities, and indigenous peoples before proceeding with the interviews.

Value to Session Participants: Being able to give feedback on the methods being proposed, connecting indigenous communities and voices with the session organizers so they can be heard through this project. Allowing the many voices in ESIP to be able to have a say in shaping the project and maximize the impact it has on indigenous communities. The session represents an opportunity for federal agencies to fulfill trust responsibility with indigenous communities.

Recommended Ways to Prepare: Participants can think about their interactions with tribal communities and thinking about the things they've seen. Thinking about their own skills and technologies they use and how to effectively transfer them is very helpful.

Speakers

Joseph Gum

Data Stewardship Coordinator, NSF NCAR

Laura Brenskelle

Madison Langseth

Science Data Manager, U.S. Geological Survey

Carolina Berys

Data Manager, CCHDO/SIO/UCSD

Andrew Child

Data Manager, University of Idaho

By training I am applied environmental ecologist, and am very interested in biological interactions in aquatic ecosystems. Currently, I work as a statewide data manager with the Idaho EPSCor GEM3 Project.

Caleb Hickman

Supervisory Biologist, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

Dr. Caleb Hickman holds a Ph.D. in Zoology with an emphasis in ecology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has worked at various universities, the Long Term Ecological Research network, and the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, gaining extensive experience with species across... Read More →

Cindy Garcia

Friday January 24, 2025 11:00am - 12:30pm EST
Room 2

Breakout, Breakout

Session Track Tags Data Stewardship, Education, Indigenous Data Sovereignty
Session Level No prior knowledge or experience - the session skims the surface or is an introduction