The projects and Interdisciplinary Challenge Teams (ICTs) within the Climate-Smart Agriculture and Food Systems portfolio are generating a variety of data types such as surveys and interviews, genetic and omics, economics, climate, traits and phenotypes. To effectively connect these outputs and maximize their impact, data must be available and understandable across research domains. This requires organizing and understanding the needs of researchers across the data lifecycle, as well as those of downstream data users such as scientists, policymakers, non-profits, governments and companies.
The Climate Smart Data Collaboration Centre (CS-DCC) will serve as a cross-cutting data coordination and collaboration hub. It will develop a federated, decentralized and distributed data ecosystem featuring common frameworks for data exchange and sharing, community-developed data standards, open-source and reusable data processing toolkits, consensus-driven data governance structures that emphasize equitability and accessibility, and community data competency and literacy development through workshops and online training.
The CS-DCC will work with the ICTs and the Agricultural Genomics in Action Centre (the knowledge mobilization hub of the Climate-Smart Agriculture initiative) to create a joint portfolio data plan in three phases: 1) development of open-source and open-access resources including data specifications, software tools, training material, guidelines and policies, and analytical workflows; 2) gradual transfer of these resources to stakeholders as they build up capacities and skills through training and community engagement; and 3) leveraging of cloud technologies to scale up a mature and sustainable data ecosystem.