Relevant for Publication database

Scientific software in the geosciences often evolves organically, growing from small, purpose-built tools into long-lived infrastructure. Using the example of the TERENO observatories and their integration into the Earth Environment DataHub, this contribution reflects on the challenges and opportunities of transforming legacy systems into sustainable, community-ready platforms.​ A central task was the migration of sensor metadata from a tightly coupled legacy system to the Helmholtz Sensor Management System, requiring a clear separation of data and metadata, adaptation to new API-based technologies, and reconciliation of differing data models and vocabularies [...]

The SensorThings API (STA) from the Open Geospatial Consortium has become a quasi-standard for publishing time-series data from sensor systems on the web. Due to its lightweight and generic data model, STA is being adopted across a wide range of domains. [...]

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides general best practices for including data quality information in data shared over the web. However, their implementation in practice often requires mapping or interpreting W3C concepts to the application domain. [...]

High-quality environmental time series data require transparent, reproducible, and well-documented quality control (QC) workflows that integrate automated procedures and expert judgment. While many QC frameworks offer algorithmic methods, the processing information explaining how data quality decisions are made — including parameterization, flag semantics, and manual interventions — is often not formalized enough to be easily reused, reproduced, or exchanged across infrastructures. [...]

The Earth Data Portal (EDP) is increasingly evolving into a central access point for Earth and environmental data, providing a unified and user-friendly interface for discovery, exploration, and reuse across distributed data providers. By harvesting and integrating heterogeneous datasets, the EDP enables researchers and other users to efficiently find, interpret, and access relevant information in one place.Within the EDP, SensorThings entities such as Things, Sensors, and Datastreams are harvested and represented as metadata records on the portal’s (meta)data page. [...]

The management of environmental time series data requires reliable configuration of data ingestion, processing, and quality control across heterogeneous sensors, formats, and research projects. Within Helmholtz Earth & Environment, this challenge is amplified by the need for standardized, reproducible, and interoperable workflows that align with the DataHub framework. [...]

We analyzed the quality assessment use cases of the Earth and Environment research initiatives, ACTRIS and TERENO, to derive common requirements and design patterns for the quality control process as a whole, as well as the related information schema, in a FAIR and reproducible manner. Based on these requirements, we designed a metadata schema that supports the entire data quality control process. [...]

The poster introduces a Digital Time Series Infrastructure for Environmental Observations, a modular, distributed and FAIR ecosystem that enables the transfer, storage, monitoring, access and distribution of sensor‐based environmental data. The platform integrates time‑series management systems such as time.io, sensor management systems such as SMS and O2A Registry, and is built on the OGC SensorThings API enriched with the STAMPLATE Schema for extended metadata. [...]

Since the first development of hectometre-scale soil moisture estimation using epithermal neutron intensity from moderated Cosmic-Ray Neutron Sensors (CRNS), researchers have hypothesize that concurrent lower‑energy, thermal neutron measurements with bare (unmoderated) detectors could also be useful for environmental sensing. Early studies in this field have highlighted the potential of thermal neutrons for monitoring biomass, plant traits, and snow water equivalent, while others underlined a soil moisture dependence that can adversely affect their usability. [...]

Since the first development of hectometre-scale soil moisture estimation using the epithermal(-dominated) neutron intensity from moderated Cosmic-Ray Neutron Sensing (CRNS) detectors, researchers have hypothesised that concurrent lower-energy, thermal(-dominated) neutron measurements with bare (unmoderated) detectors could also be useful for environmental sensing. Early studies in this field have highlighted the potential of neutrons observed with bare detectors for monitoring biomass, plant traits, and snow water equivalent, while others underlined a soil moisture dependence that can adversely affect their usability. [...]