#  1\. INTRODUCTION

This initial Data Management Plan describes the existing and planned data
management, data access and data security policies of ICOS RI.

The structure of this report consists of a general overview on the data
management of the RINGO project as a whole, as well as a more detailed
description of data management.

The mission of the European Research Infrastructure ‘Integrated Carbon
Observatory System‘ (ICOS RI) is to enable research to understand the
greenhouse gas (GHG) budgets and perturbations. The ICOS RI is a distributed
research infrastructure that provides the long-term observations required to
understand the present state and predict future behaviour of the global carbon
cycle and GHG emissions. ICOS RI ensures the continuous, high-precision and
long- term greenhouse gas measurements in Europe and adjacent key regions of
Africa and Eurasia. The backbone of ICOS RI are the three measurement stations
networks: the ICOS atmospheric, ecosystem and ocean networks. Together they
are organized within national measurement networks. Technological developments
and implementations, related to GHGs, will be promoted by the linking of
research, education and innovation.

ICOS Central Facilities (ICOS CF), which are Atmospheric Thematic Centre
(ATC), Ecosystem Thematic Centre (ETC), Ocean Thematic Centre (OTC) and the
Central Analytical Laboratories (CAL) have the specific tasks of collecting
and processing the data and samples (e.g. flask or radiocarbon samples in
Atmosphere or soil and plant tissue samples in Ecosystem observational
network) received from the national measurement networks.

ICOS ERIC is the legal entity of ICOS RI established to coordinate the
operations and the data of ICOS distributed research infrastructure, and to
develop, monitor and integrate the activities and the data of ICOS RI. The
ICOS Carbon Portal is the ICOS data centre from where ICOS data and ancillary
data sets will be published and be accessible for the users. Carbon Portal is
responsible for handling and providing ICOS data products. Carbon Portal is
being designed and envisioned as the single access point for environmental
scientists to discover, obtain, visualise and track observation measurements
produced from the observation stations as quickly as possible.

The design of the overall ICOS RI data management is challenged by the
complicated requirements of dataflow from the distributed acquisition via
centralized processing and quality assessment to the publication of the data
products. The ICOS national observation stations are highly distributed; data
are semantically diverse, organisational features of the National Networks are
different from country to country, observational measurements and resulting
data life cycles are varying between observational networks. Data definitions,
transfers and responsibilities have been discussed within ICOS RI for several
years. These discussions have been documented in numerous documents.

#  2\. Data summary

This section specifies the purpose of the data, the formats and origin, the
size and to whom it will be useful.

There are different kinds of data generated in the project. First of all,
there are experiments where new observational technologies are developed and
tested, either in the lab or in the field. The data is used to evaluate the
performance of the instrumentation and/or methods. Data and metadata are
essential for documentation and publishing of the results in the literature.
Data formats will be very similar to the current standard data formats used in
ICOS, except for new instrument specific raw data formats that are often
proprietary. Order of magnitude of the data generated is several Gigabytes.

In several work packages methods are developed for new or existing measurement
strategies. For this existing (ICOS or pre-ICOS) measurements and/or model
simulations are used. The model data will be generated using existing models.
The data will be used to evaluate the different alternatives for measurement
strategies. Data and metadata are essential for documentation and publishing
of the results in the literature. Data formats will be very similar to the
current standard data formats used in ICOS and mainly consist of netcdf files.
Order of magnitude of the data is tens of Gigabytes.

In WP5 the historical data sets (pre-ICOS) will be re-evaluated for a limited
number of stations by going back to the original raw data and a re-analysis
using methodologies as close as possible to the current data processing
standards and strategies of ICOS RI, including evaluation of the uncertainties
in the individual measurements. The data will be used and offered to the users
as improved, quality controlled and recalibrated data sets extending the ICOS
dataset to the pre-ICOS period. This dataset will be essential for inverse
modelling experiments to complement the ICOS dataset with at least 10 years of
historical data. Order of magnitude of the datasize is one gigabyte. This data
will be published through the ICOS Carbon Portal following the ICOS data
license (CC4BY) and data policy.

3\. FAIR data

#  3.1 Data findability, including provisions for metadata

This section outlines the discoverability and identifiability of the data and
the use of persistent and unique identifiers.

All data will be curated using standard EUDAT B2 services, making sure that
all data is discoverable through B2FIND. All final (Level 2) datasets will be
shared through the ICOS Carbon Portal, which will be fully implementing the
FAIR principles. All EUDAT and ICOS CP services make use of ePIC handle for
identification of all data objects. (Collections of) Level 2 products will
also be minted doi identifiers based on Datacite. All ICOS data object
metadata is shred with the GEOSS portal.

Naming conventions are not relevant due to the use of persistent identifiers
and the linked machine-readable description through metadata complying with
INSPIRE and ISO19115 as a subset. New versions of data objects receive of
course their own unique persistent identifier and in the metadata the
appropriate link to the older version is added. Same for the reference of an
updated version in the newer version.

Keywords are part of the metadata, following the appropriate (community)
standards.

#  3.2 Data accessibility

This section specifies the extent of open access, how the data is made
available, what methods and tools are used.

Experiment and model data might but will be openly accessible only after the
end of the projects as soon as the results have been published. All
publications will be open access.

Whenever possible data will be openly accessible following the ICOS CC4BY
license. Through the EUDAT B2 services of B2FIND, B2DROP and B2SHARE and the
ICOS Carbon portal all metadata and data can be found and accessed.

Where relevant and possible with regards to property rights developed software
will be made available through the open source repository Github or similar
using a GPL license.

#  3.3 Data interoperability

This section covers what data and metadata vocabularies, standards and
methodologies are used to facilitate interoperability.

All RINGO and ICOS data and metadata are designed for interoperability and in
all cases follow and in some cases even form de-factor (community) standards.
All metadata will available in INSPIRE compliant form. All ICOS Carbon Portal
data is available as linked open data and through an open SPARQL endpoint. The

RINGO project specific data will be available through the EUDAT B2 services
following the same standards.

#  3.4 Data re-use

This section specifies data licencing, availability and length of time for re-
use.

Wherever possible the data will be shared right after production following the
Creative Commons 4.0 International License with Attribution (CC4BY).
Experimental data test data will in some cases only become available after the
end of the project or publication of the results, whatever comes first, and
will be shared used the same CC4BY license.

The CC4BY licenses guarantees maximum re-use (and redistribution) while
maintaining the traceability of the use and credit to the data providers and
their sponsors.

Data quality assurance and control is central and the raison d'étre of ICOS
and the RINGO project. About 80% of the efforts spent in the ICOS Thematic
Centres is directed at data quality assurance.

ICOS RI has a time horizon of at least 20 years, the data will remain useful
and usable beyond that period. For example, now the time-series generated
since 1957 of CO  2  concentrations at Mauna Loa are still being used.

##  4\. Allocation of resources

The costs of making data fair can be estimated to be 100% of the effort by
ICOS Carbon Portal and 25% of the operational costs of the ICOS Thematic
Centres. About 10% of the RINGO budget is used for improvement of the
interoperability of the ICOS metadata.

The cost of long term preservation of the data is at this moment impossible to
estimate. On the long-term the costs of storage are foreseen to go down
tremendously. At this moment, the storage costs for ICOS are foreseen to be in
the order of 50 k€ per year.

##  5\. Data security

ICOS and RINGO produce non-sensitive data. Personal information is processes
and stored according to the ICOS privacy policy. For secure storage ICOS
relies on the European e-Infrastructure of EUDAT and EGI.

6\. Ethical aspects

Not relevant for the RINGO data.

##  7\. Other

There are several documents that are related to the data management plan
developed in RINGO. These are ICOS Data Policy document, ICOS Data lifecycle
document, ICOS Data License, and ICOS measurement protocol documentation for
Atmosphere, Ocean and Ecosystem community.