Image
Led by Professor Terry Burke at NEOF, and Dr Felix Shaw at Earlham Institute, the team aims to solve a long-standing problem in environmental science - the lack of shared standards for collecting, managing, and verifying research data.
The ARIA Accelerated Adaption project is funding rapid scientific breakthroughs to address environmental threats where climate change outpaces natural species adaptation. Environmental research programmes often lack shared standards for collecting, managing and verifying data, creating duplicated effort, inconsistent quality across teams and can take a long time to be rigorously checked and verified.
Professor Terry Burke and the team will build shared data infrastructure to fix these problems that will include a common data schema and reporting standard, open-source analysis pipelines with dedicated support, and an independent verification process that checks and badges results.
Terry said “This is an exciting opportunity, working with colleagues at the Earlham Institute and around the UK, to provide the tools and training to assist an important and original new programme on climate adaptation. We aim to help the programme produce and, in turn, report robust and reliable results, and so accelerate the programme’s longer term impact.”
The project will extend and adopt Earlham Institute’s data brokering platform - Collaborative OPen Omics (COPO). COPO is one of the few mature, production-deployed systems with a track record delivering comparable metadata curation for large international genomics consortia including Darwin Tree of Life and Biodiversity Genomics Europe.
Dr Felix Shaw, Research Software Engineer at Earlham Institute and lead COPO Developer, said: "Standards only work when they are built into the tools researchers already use and backed by people who can help when things go wrong.
“Through COPO we have spent years developing meaningful standards and tooling which properly describe research data. This multiplies its usefulness, making it comparable, reusable and trainable for the community at large. This project lets us apply that at the pace ARIA requires, so that results from one team can be trusted and reused by the next without starting from scratch."
Prof Irene Papatheodorou, Head of Data Science at Earlham Institute, said: "The role ARIA has given to data management across this priority area demonstrates how vital FAIR data management is in enabling discovery and innovation. COPO is a highly adaptable system for different data types, making it an ideal platform for unifying the diversity of research activities in this programme."
By providing standardised processes alongside hands-on support, the team aims to prove that rigorous data practices can be maintained at scale. Beyond the ARIA programme, the initiative will establish a reusable blueprint for trustworthy, transparent climate and biodiversity data infrastructure nationwide, making data accessible to UK policymakers, conservationists and the public.
