EarthCODE (Earth Science Collaborative Open Development Environment) is a European Space Agency (ESA) project, envisioning leveraging technology to empower Fair and Open Earth System Science, fostering innovation and collaboration for a sustainable future.
The second round of tendering through the ESA best practice process aimed to select existing Earth Observation (EO) platforms to integrate with EarthCODE, expanding the ecosystem of interoperable platforms contributing to the initiative. The new platforms that are being onboarded are the Insula Platform with CGI Italy and the Geohazards Exploitation Platform with Terradue. In addition, Lampata has joined the team to lead the Data Stewardship line of activities for EarthCODE.
EarthCODE is ESA’s strategic FAIR and Open Science initiative, with a mission to transform Earth System Science research. Its mission is to establish and cultivate a community of FAIR and open practice in EO and Earth System Science, leveraging new technologies for research, development and publication of scientific products and workflows by activities funded nationally, by ESA or European Commission.
EarthCODE aims to:
- Facilitate the discovery and reuse of EO research, including code and data
- Build and share reusable workflows and FAIR and open datasets with ease
- Provide long-term data preservation and catalogue research outputs
Following the first round of best practice tendering in 2024, EarthCODE has been consolidating multiple platforms, including Euro Data Cube (EDC), OpenEO and Earth System Data Lab (DeepESDL), providing flexible execution to fit research requirements. Leveraging tools like xcube and ml4xcube, and collaborating within ecosystems such as Pangeo, EarthCODE can enhance research analysis capabilities and bring computing capabilities to the data.
EarthCODE has been growing a community of users that contributes open data and methods, discovers scientific datasets and workflows, accesses advanced computing resources and collaborates to advance earth science. The project has been integrating readily available EO cloud services and open-source building blocks provided by European industry, through a yearly best practice procurement process. It also serves as a platform for Open Science capacity building, scientific communication and international cooperation.
The second best practice procurement focused on three main areas:
- Platforms with the ability to conduct scientific work with large capabilities near the data
- Provision of capabilities for one or more platforms to develop and publish interoperable workflows
- Creation of a ‘data stewardship role’, supporting onboarding of all users onto EarthCODE, and having systematic check of the data and catalogues
Geoff Busswell, VP of Business Growth, Telespazio UK, said: “EarthCODE continues to be an important part of ESA Open Science strategy, and, by the integration of additional platforms, we move one step closer to providing a seamless experience for users and developers to access data, compute resources, services and tooling.”
Anca Anghelea, the ESA Technical Officer for EarthCODE, said: “As the ecosystem of platforms and infrastructures participating in the EarthCODE initiative continues to grow, we are witnessing a broader engagement of the community in FAIR and open research practices – a cornerstone for achieving Earth Action. Looking ahead, we aim to strengthen collaboration with Member States and national infrastructures to maximise research use and ensure that both national and ESA investments deliver their full value. Through this joint effort, we can accelerate the integration of scientific discoveries and innovative methods into the economy, fostering applications that translate research into real-world impact.”