Five environmental data centres—covering oceans, atmosphere, land, geology, and the poles—will operate as a single coordinated service for the first time, ensuring that decades of UK environmental data remain accessible and usable. This matters because NERC funds thousands of research projects that generate vast amounts of environmental data—from ocean temperature records to ice-core chemistry to geological maps. Without dedicated curation, much of this data would become lost, unreadable, or impossible to combine across disciplines. Currently, each of the five centres works largely independently, making it difficult for researchers, government agencies, or businesses to find and integrate relevant datasets from different environmental domains. If successful, the harmonised service will allow users to search across all five centres simultaneously, apply common data standards, and combine diverse datasets—for example, linking oceanographic data with atmospheric records to improve climate models. The service will also support Dodona, a NERC initiative to open environmental data to new users outside academia, such as local authorities planning flood defences or energy companies siting wind farms. Capital investment will build the underlying systems and vocabularies needed to make these cross-domain searches possible. The result is a single trusted gateway to the UK’s environmental data assets, rather than five separate doors.
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The collection, management and exploitation of data is an integral part of modern environmental science. NERC's policies associated with data span all aspects of NERC's funding routes and branches of environmental science. A key part of the implementation of these policies requires NERC to fund and manage five environmental data centres: the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC), the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA), the Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC), the National Geoscience Data Centre (NDGC) and the Polar Data Centre (PDC). This proposal is presented by a consortium of BODC, CEDA, EIDC, PDC and NGDC and presents a plan for operation and management of the data centres over the period 2018-2023. The proposal explains how each data centre will to deliver core data management. These core functions enable NERC to fulfil its data policy with the primary aim of ensuring the continuing availability of environmental data of long-term value for research, teaching, and for wider exploitation for the public good, by individuals, government, business and other organisations. The specialised knowledge and domain expertise within each data centre ensures there is a trusted repository/access point for all of NERC's environmental data. The close relationship that each data centre has with its relevant research community has a number of benefits. For example, it helps maximises the acquisition of relevant data and also allows data centre staff to easily engage with the environmental science community and promulgate good data management planning and practices. The proposal also explains, for the first time, how coordination and management will be arranged across all five data centres. Whilst each data centre will remain responsible for the services to its particular sub-discipline of environmental science, the delivery and management of the programme will be harmonised so that the data centres will be able to report collectively to NERC. In addition to the core functions, a second major strand of the proposal is to increase the integration/harmonisation between data centres and to support and provide services to Dodona (NERC's new initiative in spreading the exploitation of environmental data to new users and communities). Increased harmonization between the data centres will enable more sharing of best practise and use of common tools to improve both data quality and accessibility. There is also a plan set out for capital investment in the data centres. This will predominantly be used to provide the underpinning systems, standards and vocabularies needed to increase the potential for combining NERC's diverse data sets to order to address end users' problems.
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