One of the things NSF Unidata Program Center staff members do is participate in scientific, technical, and community meetings. The insights we gain by interacting with others at meetings of groups like the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the Scientific Python community (SciPy), Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) or the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) keep us informed about issues and new developments and help us choose how to spend our efforts for the benefit of the Unidata community.
It was in this spirit that I attended a number of sessions of the ESIP January 2025 meeting, held online January 21-24. The following are a handful of things that caught my attention and seemed worth sharing.
Data for Disaster Response
Kasie Richards, the Senior Director for Situational Awareness and Decision Support for the American Red Cross, provided a nice view into how disaster response efforts make use of data from across the Earth Systems Sciences (ESS). Richards’ talk described how the Red Cross and others in disaster response are accessing and using ESS data and combining it with other types of data to make decisions on how to allocate resources during natural disaster response efforts. Her talk, Data Enhanced Decisions: Data in the Disaster Response Cycle, is available on the ESIP YouTube channel.
Resources:
Ways to Enhance Community Effectiveness
One of NSF Unidata’s primary missions is to support the ESS community in acquiring and using Earth observation data to understand our planet and its systems. Making data available is an effort that involves federal agencies, universities, and commercial organizations; Kira Sullivan-Wiley’s talk Impactful Co-Production: Building Teams, Not Just Products shed some interesting light on ways to improve this process. Sullivan-Wiley is the Senior Officer for Conservation Science at The Pew Charitable Trusts, and her description of the current thinking and research on community building and working as a team with people from very different arenas (local community members, researchers in different domains, federal agencies, etc.) was interesting to me.
Resources:
- Impactful Co-Production: Building Teams, Not Just Products talk
- Lemos, M.C., Arnott, J.C., Ardoin, N.M. et al. “To co-produce or not to co-produce.” Nat Sustain 1, 722–724 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0191-0
- Burgos, Daniella. “Building a ladder of engagement: how organizations can attract and keep supporters.” Candid, (2020). https://blog.candid.org/post/building-a-ladder-of-engagement-how-organizations-can-attract-and-keep-supporters/
Strategies for Federally Funded Data
In a similar vein, I was drawn to a panel discussion titled Federal data strategies: How can Federal agencies harness partnerships and innovation to maximize the impact of Earth science data resources? The panelists, who were from NOAA, NASA, USGS, and the U.S. National Science Foundation, gave attendees a view into the varied requirements and constraints of open access and open science policies that federal agencies were dealing with at the time of the meeting. The NSF Unidata Program has on-going, long term interactions with all of these agencies, so it was interesting to hear their views on the open science landscape.
Resources:
