Since becoming an SSI Fellow in 2023, I have chatted with other Fellows and attended the Collaborations Workshops, which gave me many ideas I had not thought about in my Fellowship plans. Meanwhile, within my role at UKCEH, colleagues in the Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC), a NERC EDS data centre, have started receiving requests to deposit model codes and are beginning to think more about how to curate and promote environmental model codes of long-term value. This open question led to discussions about the potential of bringing together data centres, software engineers, environmental modellers, and other practitioners for an ideation workshop to come up with principles to promote environmental model code of long-term value.
The event
The UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) has hosted on behalf of NERC Environmental Data Services (NERC-EDS) a workshop on the long-term value of environmental code on 21st November 2023. This workshop was funded and supported by the Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship award. 38 people registered for the hybrid workshop, with a good mixture of modellers, data managers or data stewards, data scientists, and research software engineers from different environmental science sub-disciplines. Among those who attended are SSI fellows Tom Russell, James Bryne, and Sam Harrison.
The workshop began with a keynote talk by Prof Chris Jewell (Lancaster University) on “The Generalised Epidemic Modelling (GEM) project: automating real-time infectious disease analysis“ and its role in COVID-19 modelling and reporting. The role of reproducible workflow and cyberinfrastructure was highlighted, and a new high-level modelling language (based on Python) for epidemic modelling was introduced.
This was followed by 8 lightning talks, covering a range of topics and experiences. It is encouraging to see that many in our community have already thought deeply about this topic and are enthusiastic to further this goal.
The rest of the day comprised breakout discussions on the FAIR requirements of environmental model code of long-term value. One striking observation is that many of the suggestions are in alignment with the recently published FAIR for research software principles (FAIR4RS).
A continuing conversation
This event marks the start of a conversation on fostering the long-term value of environmental model code. If you would like to get involved, please get in touch with me or any of the SSI Fellows mentioned above. A follow-on blog post will highlight some of the findings of this workshop.
Workshop report
The workshop report is now published in Zenodo and NORA (NERC Open Research Archive).