Harmonizing Data Across Continents and Networks to Address Ecological Drought

Despite the influence of drought on ecosystem functions and human well-being, there are significant uncertainties in our understanding of the impacts of drought for ecosystems and humanity. Over the past decade, large Environmental Research Infrastructures (ERIs) have been implemented around the world to advance our understanding in the responses of the biosphere to environmental change. These emergent ERIs now provide a unique opportunity to advance our understanding of ecological processes, such as drought, across continents, decades, and disciplinary boundaries. Against this backdrop, 6 ERIs (SAEON/South Africa, TERN/Australia, CERN/China, NEON/USA, ICOS/Europe, eLTER/Europe) have established an international network-to-network collaboration – the Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (GERI). To date, GERI activities have focused on garnering support, establishing baseline pathways for communications across continents and cultures and an initial mapping of each ERI’s data availability to facilitate future research.  With recent funding from a U.S. National Science Foundation AccelNet award, GERI is poised to begin harmonizing key drought-related data. Working with stakeholder partners in the The Drought-Net Research Coordination Network’s and International Drought Experiment, we have identified key baseline data products for harmonization capable of driving new discoveries across continents. These data include soil moisture, precipitation, soil texture, and aboveground biomass, water balance, etc. As we advance this project, these harmonized data will be open, findable, searchable, and accessible, and made available to the broader community for research and discovery and stakeholder networks including the International Drought- Network to test and model. Data contributions from these new and emerging networks will be encouraged and streamlined through accessible metadata and standards. Lessons learned from the intersection of global drought data will be applied to the expanding set of environmental data collected by research networks around the world.