The University of Sheffield’s NERC Environmental Omics Facility (NEOF), jointly led by Professor Terry Burke, working in partnership with the data science team at the Earlham Institute, will serve as the backbone data infrastructure for the newly announced Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) Accelerated Adaptation programme. The team aims to solve a long-standing problem in environmental science, which is the lack of shared standards for collecting, managing, and verifying research data.
The ARIA Accelerated Adaption project is funding rapid scientific breakthroughs to address environmental threats where climate change outpaces natural species adaptation. Environmental research programmes often lack shared standards for collecting, managing and verifying data, creating duplicated effort, inconsistent quality across teams and can take a long time to be rigorously checked and verified.
Professor Terry Burke and the team will build shared data infrastructure to fix these problems that will include a common data schema and reporting standard, open-source analysis pipelines with dedicated support, and an independent verification process that checks and badges results.
Terry said “This is an exciting opportunity, working with colleagues at the Earlham Institute and around the UK, to provide the tools and training to assist an important and original new programme on climate adaptation. We aim to help the programme produce and, in turn, report robust and reliable results, and so accelerate the programme’s longer term impact.”
The project will extend and adopt Earlham Institute’s data brokering platform - Collaborative OPen Omics (COPO). COPO is one of the few mature, production-deployed systems with a track record delivering comparable metadata curation for large international genomics consortia including Darwin Tree of Life and Biodiversity Genomics Europe.
Dr Felix Shaw, Research Software Engineer at Earlham Institute and lead COPO Developer said: "Standards only work when they are built into the tools researchers already use and backed by people who can help when things go wrong.
“Through COPO we have spent years developing meaningful standards and tooling which properly describe research data. This multiplies its usefulness, making it comparable, reusable and trainable for the community at large. This project lets us apply that at the pace ARIA requires, so that results from one team can be trusted and reused by the next without starting from scratch."
By providing standardised processes alongside hands-on support, the team aims to prove that rigorous data practices can be maintained at scale. Beyond the ARIA programme, the initiative will establish a reusable blueprint for trustworthy, transparent climate and biodiversity data infrastructure nationwide, making data accessible to UK policymakers, conservationists and the public.
About NERC Environmental Omics Facility
The NERC Environmental Omics Facility (NEOF) is a joint partnership between world-leading laboratories at the Universities of Sheffield and Liverpool. By pooling resources and technical expertise, NEOF delivers state-of-the-art omics capability, data support, and training to environmental scientists across the UK.
About the Earlham Institute
The Earlham Institute harnesses data-driven biology to accelerate solutions for health, biodiversity and food security. The Institute combines world-class technology and interdisciplinary expertise across genomics, engineering biology and data science to deliver scientific breakthroughs with economic and social impact.
Based at Norwich Research Park, Earlham Institute is one of eight institutes strategically funded by BBSRC.