1\. Introduction  5

1.1. Purpose of the document  5

1.2. Background of VERIFY  5

1.3. Guideline: Open Research Data Pilot  6

1.4. Scope of the deliverable  6

2\. VERIFY data summary  6

2.1. VERIFY products  6

2.2. Data Questionnaire  8

3\. FAIR Data  10

3.1. Making data findable, including provisions for metadata  10

3.2. Making data openly accessible  10

3.3. Making data interoperable  11

3.4. Increase data re-use  11

4\. General Data Management issues  12

4.1. Allocation of resources  12

4.2. Data security  12

4.3. Ethical aspects  12

5\. VERIFY data sets  13

5.1. WP1 data  13

5.2. WP2-3-4 data  13

5.3. WP5-6 data  14

5.4. WP7 data  14

#  Introduction

##  Purpose of the document

The Data Management Plan (DMP) is a key element for the overall management of
the VERIFY project. It describes the data management life cycle for the data
to be collected, processed and generated by VERIFY. This document describes
how the VERIFY consortium intends to make its research data findable,
accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR), to ensure it is soundly
managed. The present release of the Deliverable includes a collection of the
first ideas from the VERIFY partners, but it is only to be seen as an initial
version. As the project will progress – and according to the Description of
Action, the consortium will produce a second (to be issued in Month 18), a
third (to be issued in Month 36), and a fourth and final release (to be issued
at the end of the project) in order to include the applied procedures in terms
of methodology and the exhaustive group of data collected, processed and
generated by the project.

As part of making research data FAIR, the deliverable will include information
(following the successive revisions) on:

  * The data that will be collected processed and generated 

  

  * The handling of research data during and after the end of the project 

  

  * The methodology and standards that will be applied 

  

  * If data will be made open access and why 

  

  * How data will be curated and preserved (including after the end of the project). 

  

##  Background of VERIFY

VERIFY, as a Research and Innovation project, is bringing together an ensemble
of European partners, including national inventory agencies, research
institutes, in situ infrastructures (such as ICOS), operational centers
(ECMWF), a company providing consultancy and management services (ARTTIC) and
international organizations. The primary objective is to design a
preoperational system to estimate GHG fluxes from an ensemble of atmospheric
and surface observations combined with state of the art “atmospheric-
inversion” and “ecosystem models”.

VERIFY partners are at the forefront of developments in the compilation of
emission inventories, the observation of the carbon/nitrogen cycle from
ground-based and satellite measurements, the process modeling of the
carbon/nitrogen cycle, atmospheric transport modeling, and data assimilation
and inversion systems. There will be four main areas of work covering:
observations, emission inventories, ecosystem modeling and inversion systems.

The work will target four specific objectives that will lead to the production
of various data streams and information:

  1. Integrate the efforts between the research community, national inventory compilers, operational centers in Europe, and international organizations towards the definition of future international standards for the verification of GHG emissions and sinks based on independent observation. 

  

  2. Enhance the current observation and modeling ability to accurately and transparently quantify the sinks and sources of GHGs in the land-use sector for the tracking of landbased mitigation activities. 

  

  3. Develop new research approaches to monitor anthropogenic GHG emissions in support of the EU commitment to reduce its GHG emissions by 40% by 2030 compared to the year 1990. 

  

  4. Produce periodic scientific syntheses of observation-based GHG balance of EU countries and practical policy-oriented assessments of GHG emission trends, and apply these methodologies to other countries. 

  

  

##  Guideline: Open Research Data Pilot

This DMP has been prepared by taking into account the template of the
“Guidelines on Data Management in Horizon 2020”

(http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h20
20-hi-oadata-mgt_en.pdf). The elaboration of the DMP will allow VERIFY
partners to address all issues related to data handling and ethics.

We will follow the Open Research Data Pilot, which aims to improve and
maximize access to and re-use of research data generated by VERIFY. Following
the Guidelines to the “Rules on Open Access to Scientific publications and
Open Access to Research Data in Horizon 2020”, we refer to Research Data as
information and in particular facts or numbers, collected to be examined and
considered as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation.

##  Scope of the deliverable

The deliverable D8.6 Data Management Plan provides the initial outline of the
data management plan at month 6 of the project, including information on which
data sets will be created in the project, how they will be stored and
distributed within and outside the project and which datavisualization
facilities will be provided. This document represents only the initial version
of the DMP and it will be further developed over the course of the project.

#  VERIFY data summary

##  VERIFY products

Following the Description of Action of VERIFY, the products of VERIFY will
comprise reports, graphical displays, datasets (gridded and region-specific),
algorithms and code. VERIFY will deliver six major types of product to a large
community:

  * **Product 1:** Regional details of GHG anthropogenic emissions and sinks across the EU, on a 10 km grid for bottom-up models and 50 km for top-down inversions, with full documentation on algorithms and uncertainties. 

  

  * **Product 2:** Attribution of GHG fluxes in the land-use sector to management (fertilizers use, forest management, agricultural practices) versus climate drivers (climate change, rising CO  2  and nitrogen deposition). 

  

  * **Product 3:** Annually updated observation-based national GHG budgets of the EU countries for CO  2  , CH  4  and N  2  O. 

  

  * **Product 4:** Annual synthesis and reconciliation of the GHG budgets of EU countries between observation-based estimates and UNFCCC inventories performed with representatives of national inventory agencies. 

  

  * **Product 5:** Full documentation, system requirements, and implementation recommendations to operationalize the methodology of the project for the routine update of GHG budgets verified by independent observations. 

  

  * **Product 6:** Synthesis of observation-based estimates and UNFCCC GHG budgets for China, US, Indonesia, performed with foreign academic and institutional partners, based on methodologies from the project. 

  

The datasets associated to these generic Products will target a wide user
community to support them with parallel or alternative studies. Most data
products of VERIFY will be made publicly available to maximize the uptake by
the climate scientific community, the GHG inventory community and more
generally all stakeholders.

We envisage making use of existing data portals to ensure full visibility of
the datasets and to partly rely on these portals to store, distribute and
visualize the data. The exact framework is not finalized but we will rely on
three different infrastructures - all being developed by partners of VERIFY:

i) the ICOS Carbon portal, ii) the Global Carbon Atlas from the GCP, and iii)
the Climate Data Store (CDS) from the Copernicus program.

Table 1 below lists the main category of data sets that will be produced by
VERIFY and thus stored on a database with means to access them and visualize
their content (i.e., maps, time series, histograms, etc).

**Table 1: Main categories of output data sets from VERIFY.**  
  
<table>  
<tr>  
<th>

**Context / Type of data**

</th>  
<th>

**Model/Observation types**

</th>  
<th>

**Application**

</th>  
<th>

**Output fields**

</th> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

Continental (EU) gridded data

products

</td>  
<td>

Inventories of GHG emissions at high spatial and temporal resolution

Output of regional atmospheric inversion and land/ocean

ecosystem models

</td>  
<td>

Raw output data that will be used for the synthesis of GHG emissions and sinks
estimates at country level

</td>  
<td>

Fluxes of CO  2  , CH  4  , N  2  O

Land carbon stocks (above and below

ground)

</td> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

Global gridded data products

</td>  
<td>

Output of global atmospheric inversions and from global land/ocean ecosystem
models

</td>  
<td>

Global scale products used to complement the

European data sets and to provide fluxes of GHG for other regions than Europe
(China, US, Indonesia for

instance)

</td>  
<td>

Fluxes of CO  2  , CH  4  , N  2  O

</td> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

Region-specific time series (fact sheet)

</td>  
<td>

Synthesis of the raw gridded data sets in terms of country total annual GHG
fluxes (anthropogenic and

natural

</td>  
<td>

Main output of VERIFY to be compared with UNFCC inventory estimates of

GHG emissions

</td>  
<td>

Fluxes of CO  2  , CH  4  and N  2  O per country on an

annual basis.

Fluxes for European countries and also

</td> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

Software managed under a “content management software” (GitHub).

</td>  
<td>

Software to be used by the climate scientific community: Community Inversion
Framework

(CIF)

</td>  
<td>

Community inversion system to be used by all climate research group to produce
independent, traceable and transparent GHG flux estimates from atmospheric
inversions.

</td>  
<td>

Software that produce fluxes of GHG, either

CO  2  , CH  4  or N  2  0 depending on the implementation and application of
the CIF.

</td> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

Synthesis / Reports on GHG emissions

and sinks

</td>  
<td>

Synthesis of different model estimates and observations

</td>  
<td>

Report for policymakers and the inventory agencies, describing strengths and
weaknesses (with error assessment) of the data-driven GHG flux estimates.

</td>  
<td>

Flux estimates with critical analysis of the associated

uncertainties;

analysis of the difference between UNFCC statistics and

VERIFY products

</td> </tr> </table>

##  Data Questionnaire

A questionnaire has been prepared in order to gather from each VERIFY partners
information on the data that they will provide. The Questionnaire is
accessible online at:  _https://form.jotformeu.com/80422120148342_

This information will be further synthesized by work packages and evaluated in
order to implement the appropriated Data Management Plan. Unfortunately the
Questionnaire was only released during the 2018 summer period; most partners
have thus not completed it yet.

**Table 2: Data Management Plan Questionnaire for VERIFY**  
  
<table>  
<tr>  
<th>

**Main class of data management question**

</th>  
<th>

**Set of specific questions**

</th> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

**Data set description**

</td>  
<td>

  1. Specific questions to describe the data provider and the associated task: [WP, Task, first name, last name] 

  

  2. Description of the data set with specific Keywords including which GHG [CO  2  , CH  4  , N  2  0], the type [Flux, stock, concentration], the nature [anthropogenic, natural], the origin [land based, lake-river based, ocean based, atmosphere based], the method [atmospheric inversion, land ecosystem model, ocean ecosystem model] 

  

  3. Data qualification [spatially gridded data, integrated data, site data, etc.] 

  

  4. Data Size Description: how many dimensions are used? to evaluate the size of the data 

  

  5. Information on the existence (or not) of similar data, the number of releases intended 

  

  

</td> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

**Data access and associated metadata**

</td>  
<td>

  1. Initial data access [from a Threeds server, from a specific ftp site, etc.] 

  

  2. Suggestion of additional metadata on the top of required ones [owner, creator, date of creation, start and end date, data coverage]. 

  

  3. Are there ancillary data [errors estimates, etc.] attached to your data? 

  

  

</td> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

**Data sharing**

</td>  
<td>

  1. Description of how the data will be shared [widely open or restricted to VERIFY partners] during and after the project. 

  

  2. In case the dataset cannot be shared, the reasons for this should be mentioned (e.g. ethical, rules of personal data, intellectual property, commercial, privacy-related, security-related). 

  

  3. Access URL? 

  

  

</td> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

**Data visualization**

</td>  
<td>

1) Services to be associated with the data [online search and download, Maps
visualization, Time series visualization, etc.]?

</td> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

</td>  
<td>

2) Visualization type that are expected: [static, interactive, live documents
(notebook)]

</td> </tr> </table>

#  FAIR Data

The main objective is to manage all data produced by VERIFY following the
Findable Accessible Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) policy. For that we will
make use of existing expertise in infrastructure such as i) the ICOS Carbon
Portal (https://www.icos-cp.eu/), ii) the Carbon Atlas
(http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org/en/content/welcome-carbon-atlas) of the
Global Carbon Project and iii) the Climate Data Store
(https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/#!/home), which is currently under
development by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Copernicus climate
data store.

##  Making data findable, including provisions for metadata

We will make sure that all data produced in the project will be discoverable
with specific metadata including standard “qualifiers” of the discipline (see
example of metadata proposed in the Questionnaire, Table 2). A list of all
metadata associated the VERIFY data sets will be provided in the next version
of the DMP.

Additionally, the data will be locatable by means of standard identification
mechanisms, such as the Digital Object Identifiers (DOI).

The data file will follow a specific naming convention that will be defined by
the Executive board of VERIFY. Such naming convention will take care of the
version numbers as the objective of VERIFY is to deliver each year updated
products.

##  Making data openly accessible

Overall, the data sharing procedures will be the same across the datasets and
will be in accordance with the Grant Agreement.

Most mature data products of VERIFY will be made publicly available to
maximize the uptake by the climate scientific community, the inventory
community and all stakeholders. At minimum all data will be available to the
consortium during the project and most of them will be publicly available.
Restricted data will be following contractual reasons, especially to protect
the publication of the dataset by the data producer during the project
duration. The reasons for restricted data access will be provided for each
data set.

At this stage the structure of the database is not completely selected, and
offers two possibilities:

i) creating a project database hosted by the coordinator, or ii) using the
cloud through EUDAT infrastructure to store and manage all data sets.
Depending on the solution different tools/software will be use to search for,
get access and visualize the different data sets.

In the case of an internal solution, it is foreseen to make use of a specific
software, MongoDB, to search through the metadata catalogue of the internal
database (see  _https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB_ )  .

##  Making data interoperable

We will seek to make all mature and publicly available data set of VERIFY
interoperable. We will therefore follow the standards for data format and
metadata. We will use Netcdf4 format and the CF convention (Climate and
Forecast convention:  _http://cfconventions.org/_ )  , as default.

We will make the database and data visualization facilities compatible with
the GEO portal (http://www.geoportal.org/)

##  Increase data re-use

Following the Questionnaire we will associate to each data set a possible
embargo before the data become publicly available (to give time to data
producer to publish the data set). However, we seek to have all mature data of
VERIFY publicly available well before the end of the project.

At the end of the project the database (if based on an internal data
repository) will be transferred to a more perennial infrastructure, the ICOS
Carbon Portal and/or the Climate Data Store of the Copernicus program. The
decision will be made during the course of VERIFY with the two partners in
charge of these infrastructures (ICOS and ECMWF). This will ensure that the
data remains reusable for a long period of time (decades at least).

For a proper re-use of the data, a description of the method behind each data
set will be provided as well as a description of all quality checks that were
done.

#  General Data Management issues

##  Allocation of resources

The cost of making the data FAIR will be shared across the data providers
(each partner of VERIFY) and the coordinator who is managing the database
(data repository, data saving and archiving, data visualization, etc):

  * The data provider will make sure his data are compliant with international standard such as CF compliant Netcdf format, providing the necessary data description and metadata for an efficient use of their data sets. 

  

  * The coordinator (CEA-LSCE) will take care of the main FAIR aspects, with the associated cost. It will define and manage the database and data visualization facilities. 

  

The long-term preservation of the data will be discussed internally; all
products of VERIFY are expected to be transferred in one of the main European
data infrastructure relevant to GHG: the ICOS Carbon Portal and/or the
Copernicus data storage facility. The associated cost will be primarily taken
by the coordinator.

##  Data security

After the collection of data files, it is important to ensure that the files
are saved under a security directory. This implies that it is crucial to
control the use of the data files within the database and who will have “write
access” to the all data files.

We are currently studying the possibility to use the EUDAT system to store the
data, through the ICOS Carbon Portal infrastructure. The security issues may
thus be dealt with differently, depending on the solution chosen. In the case
of storing the data under a specific VERIFY database, the coordinator (CEA-
LSCE) will ensure that the responsibilities and authorities of a DMP group
members (corresponding to the Executive Board) will be clearly declared and
that all steps during data collection and about data management can be secured
completely. In the case of using the EUDAT system, we will rely on this
European Infrastructure for data security.

##  Ethical aspects

The VERIFY partners will comply with the ethical principles as set out in
Article 34 of the Grant Agreement, which states that all activities must be
carried out in compliance with:

  * The ethical principles (including the highest standards of research integrity e.g. as set out in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity, and including, in particular, avoiding fabrication, falsification, plagiarism or other research misconduct) and Commission recommendation (EC) No 251/2005 of 11 March 2005 on the European Charter for Researchers and on a Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers (OJ 

  

L 75, 22.03.2005, p. 67), the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity
of ALLEA (All European Academies) and ESF (European Science Foundation) of
March 2011.

  * Applicable international, EU and national law. 

  

Furthermore, activities raising ethical issues will comply with the ‘ethics
requirements’ set out in the deliverable D9.1.

#  VERIFY data sets

This section will summarize the different data sets of VERIFY following the
responses to the Questionnaire. Due to the late distribution of the
Questionnaire, it will be completed in the next update of the DMP.

##  WP1 data

WP1 will produce mainly text documents that will be available during the
project duration to all

VERIFY members through the internal platform

( _https://projectsworkspace.eu/sites/VERIFY/SitePages/My%20VERIFY.aspx_ ;
with password protection) and to the external community through the public
website

( _http://verify.lsce.ipsl.fr/index.php_ )  .

##  WP2-3-4 data

These three work packages will produce the main raw data for the overall
VERIFY objectives, i.e. data-driven (atmospheric, land, ocean based) estimates
of GHG fluxes. These will be mainly gridded fluxes of CO  2  , CH  4  and N  2
O following two major approaches:

  * Bottom up approaches: fluxes derived from land/ocean ecosystem models constrained by in situ observations. 

  

  * Top-down approaches: fluxes derived from the valorization of atmospheric GHG concentration measurements through atmospheric transport inversion. 

  

We provide below one example of these data sets following first responses to
the Questionnaire and using few additional information from the document of
work. The complete list of all data set description will be available in the
next update of the DMP.

Additionally, the three WP will produce a Community Inversion Framework (CIF)
that will be managed under the GitHub software for traceability and exchange
with all climate research group across Europe.

**Table 3: Example of datasets for CO2 fluxes.**  
  
<table>  
<tr>  
<th>

</th>  
<th>

**CO 2  flux estimates from ORCHIDEE land surface model **

</th> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

**Data set description**

</td>  
<td>

European biosphere-atmosphere exchange fluxes of CO  2  from the Vegetation,
including gross fluxes (Photosynthesis and Respiration) from the ORCHIDEE
Model. The ORCHIDEE parameters will be calibrated against CO  2  flux
measurements from the FLUXNET network, satellite NDVI measurement (MODIS) and
globally from atmospheric CO  2  observations.

The data will be available at approx. 5-7 km x 5-7 km horizontal resolution
for the past two decades.

The data will be updated each year of the project.

</td> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

**Standards and metadata**

</td>  
<td>

The product will be available in netCDF-4 format compliant with CF
conventions. Metadata information will be included in the global attributes of
the Netcdf file.

</td> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

**Data sharing**

</td>  
<td>

The data set will be made publicly available as part of the primary raw data
of VERIFY.

</td> </tr>  
<tr>  
<td>

**Data visualization**

</td>  
<td>

Data visualization (Maps and aggregated time series for pre-defined regions)
will be made available (as in the Carbon Atlas web site)

</td> </tr> </table>

##  WP5-6 data

WP5 and WP6 will produce annual total GHG budget (emissions and sinks) for the
anthropogenic and natural (LULUCF) sectors, for all European countries based
on the raw data produced in WP23-4. These correspond to the observational
based Fact-Sheets (described for instance in deliverable D5.6) of GHG budgets
using both bottom-up and top-down estimates from WP2-3-4. WP6 will produce
similar Fact-Sheets comparing observation based and inventory budgets of GHG
per country (for European countries and USA, China and Indonesia). The Fact-
Sheets will be described in the next update of the DMP.

##  WP7 data

Like WP1, WP7 will produce mainly text documents and summary/synthetic
presentations that will be available during the project duration to all VERIFY
members through the internal platform  (
_https://projectsworkspace.eu/sites/VERIFY/SitePages/My%20VERIFY.aspx_ ;  with
password protection) and to the external community through the public website
( _http://verify.lsce.ipsl.fr/index.php_ )  . The major annual documents
(updated each year) will be described in the next DMP update.