The NSF Unidata Program receives the majority of its funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Every five years, the program submits a new proposal for core program funding to the NSF, outlining past accomplishments and describing plans for future activities.
As Unidata entered the final year of the most recent NSF proposal period, which ended on April 30, 2024, Program Center staff and members of Unidata's governing committees engaged in conversations about the future direction of the program. The impact of existing programs, requests from community members for new or augmented services, and prognostications about the future needs of the geoscience educators and researchers all figured into the discussions. The resulting proposal, titled Unidata Reimagined: New Approaches to Community Data Services, was submitted to the NSF early October 2023.
While official notification was delayed past the end of our most recent award, we are pleased to inform our community that the proposal was reviewed favorably and funding for NSF Unidata's continued operation has been awarded by the NSF. Award number 2403649 runs through mid-2029 (subject to the availability of funding).
While much of the work proposed involves the continuation and extension of existing programs, projects, and services, the proposal does refine the focus of program activities as described in the grant abstract published by NSF:
NSF Unidata engages and serves researchers and educators who are advancing the frontiers of their fields; it supports their efforts by creating opportunities for community members from many backgrounds and disciplines to share data, knowledge, methods, and expertise. As part of this effort, NSF Unidata provides well-integrated data services and software tools that address the entire geoscientific data lifecycle, from locating and retrieving useful data, through the process of analyzing and visualizing data either locally or remotely, to curating and sharing the results. NSF Unidata serves more than 1,500 universities and colleges worldwide, which forms the core of a member community spanning thousands of government and research institutions worldwide that rely on Unidata products and services.
Dramatic changes in the technological, scientific, educational, and public policy landscape are transforming the ways our community members conduct their research and educate new generations of scientists. To meet these challenges, NSF Unidata is reimagining how the program can best fulfill its mission. The full proposal describes how NSF Unidata plans to serve its community going forward by focusing on four types of activities:
- Providing Data and Tools: ensuring fair and equitable access to ESS and other data from a variety of sources, along with cutting-edge tools to analyze and visualize that data.
- Reducing Barriers to Participation: building partnerships with minority-serving institutions and under-resourced groups to increase engagement and collaboration; helping to build a broader, more inclusive community of ESS practitioners.
- Fostering Community Action: engaging community members to advance adoption of initiatives like FAIR and CARE data principles to promote Open Science concepts.
- Providing Innovative Technical Solutions: guiding the ESS community toward technical solutions that leverage innovations in AI/ML, modern open-source software, and cloud-centric tools.
Within these broad categories, NSF Unidata proposes a variety of actions guided by concepts like convergence science, community hubs, eLearning, and science gateway that bring together varied data, software tools for analysis and visualization, and learning resources. In advancing the aforementioned goals, the program will continue to expand its partnerships with underserved communities, collaborating with Tribal Colleges and Universities, Historical Black Colleges and Universities, and other minority-serving institutions across the U.S. to provide training and scientific opportunities for students alongside data services and technical support for researchers and educators.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
You can read the full text of the proposal, or the one-page project summary.
NSF Unidata's new award reflects a funding increase relative to the previous five-year award amount. NSF was not, however, able to provide core funding at the level requested in the Unidata Reimagined proposal. As a result, and in consultation with our governing committees, we are considering ways to adjust our proposed activities to align with the resources available.
The UPC staff is gratified to receive the continuing support of the U.S. National Science Foundation and the broad Unidata community.
