Soil Water Content

Asset type:

Use Case

Description:

Access interoperable datasets on soil water content (SWC) along with contextual data and metadata from diverse research infrastructures.

Keywords:

soil, soil water content, environmental variables, water resource management, disasterm management, soil moisture, remote sensinf, anaee, icos, danubius, sios, elter, lifewatch

Subdomain:

Biodiversity And Ecosystems

Infrastructure:

AnaEE; ICOS; Danubius; SIOS; eLTER; LifeWatch

Scope:

In the framework of the ENVRI-Fair project (https://envri.eu/home-envri-fair/) which brings together European research infrastructures (RIs) in the field of the environment to organise their contribution to the EOSC data portal, a use case is being set up around soil water content. This quantity is measured in several of the infrastructures, particularly in the field of ecosystems. The objective is to make data from different RIs available by testing the interoperability of systems through the deployment of a FAIR strategy. One of the strengths of RIs is to have soil water content data with a good quality surrounded by observations of the acquisition context (soil, vegetation, climate, ecosystems). The use case also have to meet the needs of users by offering a rich search interface. The goal of the survey is to ask user their opinion on the search criteria and the nature of the data to delivered by a query made on the portal. From that survey, a semantic model has been proposed to determine and name the main metadata that are used by the querying tools and the dataset description. The EML standard has been used for metadata discovery and the LifeWatch ERIC Metatada Catalogue was used to collect a dataset from each involved Research Infrastructure and ensure the interoperability. The datasets gathered and used for this use case are available here. Even if the metadata fields provided by the EML standard sufficiently describe the SWC datasets, they have shown limitation for advanced queries on the existence of contextual variables or on the datasets exploitation metadata and thus a dedicated portal has been developed for advanced searches. DCAT model and its extension developed in the frame of ENVRI-FAIR has been preferred whenever possible and all metadata are gathered in a RDF triple store. The metadata collection flows and the alignment of the vocabularies have been important issues. The availability of the metadata through machine to machine process has been analysed and Recommendations to data providers to annotate their datasets have been also given. These concerns the dataset description itself, but also the site description that holds part of the useful information.

Target users:

Researchers, Academic Community, Land Managers

Additional Information:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12eomQq3uOoJeNPEX--gBbsODn3skUOK-

Developer(s):

A. Chanzy (andre.chanzy@inrae.fr), G. L’Abate (giovanni.labate@crea.gov.it)

Repository:

https://github.com/lbtgnn68/ENVRI-FAIR-WP11---Soil-Water-Content-UC