LinkedEarth at the EarthCube Annual Meeting 2022

Held in beautiful La Jolla, California, the EarthCube annual meeting brought together geo-, computer, and data scientists to talk about cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences.

The LinkedEarth leadership team (Julien Emile-Geay, Nick McKay and myself) showcased tools and other initiatives they have been developing over the last few years. This was the first time the entire team gathered since the beginning of the pandemic so a picture was in order:

Read on for a summary of the various presentations, links to relevant information and new (and updated) tools.

A summary of LinkedEarth activities

On the last day of the conference, Julien Emile-Geay gave a retrospective on LinkedEarth and highlighted a few of our most recent activities. You can find the slides here: TL;DR:

On the menu:

• Standardization of paleoclimate data with the Linked PaleoData format (LiPD) and associated crowdsourced reporting standard (PaCTS).
• Tools that enable the creation of LiPD files, access to existing files created through synergistic collaboration with various PAGES working groups, and analysis of these datasets in R and Python.
• Community activities such as hackathons and townhalls.
• The launch of our Discourse forum for all your paleoclimate related questions
• And tutorials in the form of notebooks on various GitHub repositories (see our gallery) and YouTube videos.

Demos

I gave a short demonstration (slides) of some of the LinkedEarth tools, highlighted by Julien. Of note (and further development since the conference):

• Pyleoclim, a Python package for the analysis of paleoclimate data. The paper describing the package is currently under review in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology. A pre-print version is available through the Earth and Space Science Open Archive (ESSOAr). The manuscript contains many technical details about the package as well as three example notebooks of scientific workflows that are available on GitHub.
• autoTS, an artificial intelligence framework for timeseries analysis (in other words, we taught an AI timeseries analysis!) We are actively developing workflows for the platform and hope to make it available to the community soon.

Electronic Notebooks

For the past several years, EarthCube has been publishing electronic notebooks as scholarly objects. This year, we showcased two of our activities in this format:

• GeoChronR: an R package for the analysis of paleoclimate data (read our blog about this wonderful tool). You can see the submission here and execute it in a no-install environment here. This particular submission had the honor to be the only R representative in a sea of Python.
• PaleoHack: educational notebooks using Pyleoclim. You can see the submission here and execute here.

Feel free to use these resources as tutorials to help you get started with GeoChronR or Pyleoclim!

Towards a geoscience paper of the future v2.0

I was also invited on a panel on FAIR and Enriched Contextualization of Geoscience Resources organized by David Fulker (OPeNDAP) though my involvement with the Scientific Paper of the Future. This initiative predates the concept of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data, software and workflows but presented many of the same concepts. More importantly, it gives tangible examples of steps scientists can make to ensure that their work meets the FAIR requirements that are being rolled out by funding agencies and publishers. The slides are available here.

Thank you, EarthCube!

On a more personal note, I received a Community Service and Leadership Award! (And yes, I was wearing sunscreen).