The National Environmental Science Program (NESP) is an Australian Government initiative, funded by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment, and Water. NESP has 4 hubs, each dedicated to addressing major research challenges: ensuring sustainable communities, maintaining biodiversity, responding to climate change, and protecting our marine environment.
The Sustainable Communities and Waste Hub explores ways to reduce the effects of plastic, hazardous substances and pollutants on people and the environment. It is hosted by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in partnership with universities and government research organisations across Australia.
Through its research, the hub generates valuable data that can be used by researchers, policymakers and the public. The project will ensure the data is accompanied by metadata, providing a detailed description of characteristics such as format, contents and location. The project will also ensure researchers assign persistent identifiers (PIDs), which are permanent, unique references assigned to the data that enable easy discovery, retrieval and citation, regardless of the data’s location.
Because the research undertaken within the hub spans various disciplines, the data are often diverse and dispersed across multiple institutions, making it challenging to locate, access and reuse. The project will ensure that the research outputs from the hub-led projects are FAIR – findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. FAIR outputs will amplify the hub’s impact on the environment and sustainability, inform better decision making and increase community engagement.
UNSW is working to develop standardised metadata protocols, outlining how to describe data in a clear and consistent way and assign them with persistent identifiers. This work, supported by the ARDC, will ensure all data in the Sustainable Communities and Waste Hub is consistent, discoverable and accessible.
Specifically, this project will involve analysing the current data landscape in the hub to understand the type, format, and location of the data, and who would need it. Based on this information, the project will identify data management best practices with partner institutions. Protocols will then be developed to standardise metadata elements and persistent identifiers, ensuring that all data are described in a uniform way that adheres to the FAIR principles.
The protocols will then be implemented for projects in the NESP Sustainable Communities and Waste Hub. By applying these standard protocols, the data will become more easily accessible and discoverable by researchers, policymakers and the public. These initiatives will ensure that data produced by the Sustainable Communities and Waste Hub contribute to better outcomes for the community.
This initiative will allow data from the Hub to be integrated into ARDC Research Data Australia (a data discovery service of the ARDC), providing a clear and consistent way to link, organise, and credit the data at a national scale to enable research and improved decision-making.
This project is part of the Domain Data Portals program.
The key outcomes of this project are:
