Project Grant 2411333

This $623,273 federal Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation's Division of Earth Sciences (CFDA 47.050 Geosciences) will fund the development of the Tephra Information Portal (TIP) - a prototype platform to improve curation, integration, sharing, and discovery of Earth science data.

Specifically, the project will create a sustainable framework for "fair data communities" to address the lack of standardized, machine-readable, FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) compliant data in the Earth sciences. Using the global volcanic ash (tephra) research community as a test case, the effort will leverage existing cyberinfrastructure to integrate and connect diverse geoinformatics resources and data. Key objectives include helping researchers manage data, ensuring consistent data formats and rich metadata, creating a centralized catalog of curated tephra data, and providing a single access point for distributed datasets. The project aims to enhance equity and inclusion in the geosciences through workshops, outreach, training, and accessible research tools.