Data Steward Service Center – the FAIRagro RDM-expertise hub

FAIRagro (https://fairagro.net) is the NFDI consortium for the agrosystem sciences (focusing mainly on plant, soil and environment research). As a central institution within FAIRagro, the Data Steward Service Center (DSSC) aims to harmonize data management and is one of the most important connecting points between FAIRagro and the scientific agrosystem community and beyond. The DSSC organizes the continuous exchange of research data management (RDM) knowledge and experience. It consists of the FAIRagro data stewards, who are experts in the field of RDM for agrosystem research. They channel user requests and feedback from the community to FAIRagro developers. Knowledge about products and services is collected from the developers, translated and passed along to the community as part of professional trainings. The well-trained data stewards bring together expertise on data from different parts of the agrosystem science like soil data, general field data, genetic data („omics data“), phenotyping data, field robotics & sensor data, and big geo data. These competencies are embedded in the context of FAIRagro‘s research disciplines, ranging cross-scale from genes, phenomics, crop trials and management to landscapes and regions. They include different data categories comprising sensitive data, time series, remote sensing, omics and geo data. Further, the DSSC offers legal support, looking at questions dealing with e.g. anonymisation/pseudonymisation or copyright and licenses. Knowledge and expertise is pooled to provide the full range of expertise to the community. This understanding of these different FAIRagro disciplines and the integrative work of the data stewards will foster the coalescence of the community.

The DSSC provides the following services: The FAIRagro data stewards, working together as the DSSC, form the FAIRagro Helpdesk. There, they act as interface between the agricultural community and the developers of the FAIRagro products. They have a comprehensive understanding of data issues, process support requests from the helpdesk (2nd level support) and establish contact to the developers if necessary (3rd level support). Besides the personal support for the community, easy-to-understand materials, like a list of repository recommendations or a collection of Open Educational Resources (OER), are collected in the FAIRagro Toolbox where they provide low-threshold access to FAIRagro-relevant information (1st level support).

Next to the hands-on support on specific questions via the helpdesk, trainings tailored to the needs of the users of the FAIRagro infrastructure and data management requests are offered. This includes cooperations with other RDM service providers like other NFDI consortia, universities, universities of applied sciences and non university research institutions. These trainings are prepared and organized by the closely related training and education unit of FAIRagro and conducted in close cooperation with the data stewards. In addition to general training and specific RDM courses, reusable training materials in the sense of Open Educational Resources (OER) are created. As a central document, a training manual will be written jointly by the training coordinators and data stewards to enable trainers to design their own training courses on RDM in agrosystem research.

With our poster we explain how the DSSC is integrated into the agrosystem community, what the expertise of our data stewards are, what services they support and how they can be contacted in terms of RDM questions. Further, we inform about our close connections between the data stewards and the FAIRagro training unit.