Environmental Data Science Book: a community-driven resource showcasing open-source Environmental science

Abstract

<p>With the plethora of open data and computational resources available, environmental data science research and applications have accelerated rapidly. Therefore, there is an opportunity for community-driven initiatives compiling and classifying open-source research and applications across environmental systems (polar, oceans, forests, agriculture, etc). Building upon the Pangeo Gallery, we propose <em>The Environmental Data Science book</em> (https://the-environmental-ds-book.netlify.app), a community-driven online resource showcasing and supporting the publication of data, research and open-source developments in environmental sciences. The target audience and early adopters are i) anyone interested in open-source tools for environmental science; and ii) anyone interested in reproducibility, inclusive, shareable and collaborative AI and data science for environmental applications. Following FAIR principles, the resource provides multiple features such as guidelines, templates, persistent URLs and Binder to facilitate a fully documented, shareable and reproducible notebooks. The quality of the published content is ensured by a transparent reviewing process supported by GitHub related technologies. To date, the community has successfully published five python-based notebooks: two forest-, two wildfires/savanna- and one polar-related research. The notebooks consume common Pangeo stack e.g. intake, iris, xarray, hvplot for interactive visualisation and modelling from Environmental sensor data. In addition to constant feature enhancements of the GitHub repository https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/environmental-ds-book, we expect to increase inclusivity (multiple languages), diversity (multiple backgrounds) and activity (collaboration and coworking sessions) towards improving scientific software practises in the environmental science community.</p>