A new chapter begins for integrated environmental science with the public launch of the upgraded ENVRI-Hub. Developed over two years by the ENVRI-Hub NEXT project, this platform is now available to the research community, offering improved access to Europe’s environmental research infrastructures.

“This launch is a testament to the consolidated collaboration across our consortium of Research Infrastructures and e-infrastructures, which has also been showcased on major stages like the EGU General Assembly and meetings with international communities such as WMO.” Marta Gutierrez, EGI Foundation, ENVRI-Hub NEXT Project Director

Your Gateway to Environmental Research

The launch is built upon the solid foundation laid during the project’s first 18 months, transitioning from a promising blueprint to a powerful, operational reality. The upgraded platform, accessible via its refreshed landing page, integrates a suite of enhanced and new tools designed for researchers:

• A Catalogue of Services  and Catalogue of Data: Serving as FAIR-compliant entry points, the Catalogues offer intuitive interfaces and API access libraries, streamlining the discovery of data and services across Europe’s research infrastructures.
• The new ENVRI Knowledge Base transforms how you find information. Powered by advanced AI, it enables dialogue-based natural-language searches to quickly locate datasets, publications, and code across the environmental sciences.
• An Analytical Framework supported by two harmonised Python libraries, allowing programmatic access to the Catalogue of Services and to the environmental research infrastructure’s datasets. 
• A global design focussing on essential climate variables (ECVs) with new filtering options in the Catalogue of Services, specific indexation in the AI system, specific parameterisation possibilities in the Python libraries, and normalised by the iADOPT ontology to describe scientific variables in a common way.  
• Single Sign On across the Hub services and integrated research infrastructures through ENVRI-ID, an EOSC-interoperable Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI), via a range of providers such as EDUGAIN, ORCID, Google and GITHUB.
• In collaboration with our sister project ENVRINNOV, we have integrated an Innovation Hub. This new component connects scientific research with entrepreneurial vision, fostering the development of market-ready solutions and sustainable business models from environmental data.

“The 2026 deployment successfully integrates our core services, from the Catalogue and Knowledge Base to the Analytical Framework, into a cohesive platform. This technical milestone proves our architecture is robust and ready for community testing and validation. Beyond technical readiness, this also represents the foundational milestone in establishing the ENVRI-Hub as the definitive ENVRI Node within the EOSC Framework, bridging the gap between environmental science and EOSC.” Ulrich Bundke, Forschungszentrum Jülich & IAGOS, ENVRI-Hub NEXT Technical Coordinator

Contribute to the Launch

This new Hub is built for and with our community. We invite all researchers, data scientists, and stakeholders to explore its capabilities, test its features, and shape its future.

To introduce the platform, we have hosted a dedicated launch webinar on 23 April 2026, providing an overview and quick demonstrations of some of the Hub’s new features. Meet us at EGU26 in Vienna and take the short course about the ENVRI-Hub.

Your exploration and feedback are crucial as we enter this exciting final year of the ENVRI-Hub NEXT project, focusing on community-driven refinement and widespread adoption. You can sign up for the ENVRI-Hub User Group to receive updates about meetings, consultations, training activities, and contribute to the future evolution of the Hub.

An article introducing the ENVRI-Hub was published in the April 2026 edition of ERCIM News (Issue 144), as part of the special theme “Open Science Experiences and Prospects”.

The article, titled “ENVRI-Hub: A Science Gateway for Open Environmental Research,” was authored by Federico Drago (EGI Foundation), Delphine Dobler (Euro-Argo ERIC), and Ulrich Bundke (Forschungszentrum Jülich / IAGOS AISBL) on behalf of the ENVRI-Hub NEXT project. It presents the recently upgraded ENVRI-Hub platform as a central science gateway for Europe’s environmental research, demonstrating how interoperable Virtual Research Environments can accelerate collaborative Open Science and make FAIR data actionable for tackling global challenges.

About the Special Issue

Guest edited by Leonardo Candela (CNR-ISTI) and Roberto Di Cosmo (Inria and University Paris Cité), the special theme explores the current state of Open Science across Europe. The editors note that while Open Science has become an operational requirement embedded in national strategies and funding conditions, fragmentation remains a key challenge. The issue brings together contributions on federated infrastructures, semantic frameworks, governance, skills, and operational experiences from major European initiatives.

The ENVRI-Hub article sits within a cluster of contributions focusing on operational experiences with federated science gateways, alongside pieces on the EOSC EU Node, the EOSC Core Innovation Sandbox, D4Science virtual research environments, and other initiatives.

About the Article

Our contribution describes how the ENVRI-Hub enables researchers to search for, access, and process datasets and services across Europe’s environmental research infrastructures. It highlights key components such as the Catalogue of Services, the AI-powered Knowledge Base, and the Virtual Research Environment interface, with a core focus on making Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) easily accessible and processable from all contributing sources. The article also emphasises the platform’s community-driven development and its alignment with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

The full ERCIM News Issue 144 is available online.

In the photo, left to right: Cathrine Lund Myhre (ACTRIS), Marta Gutierrez (EGI Foundation), Alex Vermeulen (ICOS), Anca Hienola (Finnish Meteorological Institute), Paolo Laj (WMO). Photo courtesy of WMO and iClimateAction. 

Over the past several months, ENVRI-Hub NEXT representatives have played an active role in shaping discussions within the WMO’s iClimateAction (iCA) initiative, contributing key expertise on Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) and technical developments from the ENVRI-Hub platform.

The engagement began in the autumn of 2025 with a series of technical webinars designed to prepare participants for an in-person joint meeting of the GCOS-WGClimate-iClimateAction, hosted at ESA in Harwell, UK, from 9 to 13 February 2026. These sessions aimed to give participants a shared understanding of the current landscape of climate data and knowledge systems, enabling focused discussions on gaps, priorities, and next steps.

“Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) are critical to understanding global climate impacts. The climate observation data value chain is a complex ecosystem currently undergoing rapid evolution driven by the AI revolution. ENVRI-Hub NEXT will support the iClimateAction activity by facilitating the assessment and exploitation of the diverse climate observing systems the ENVRI community offers.” – Marta Gutierrez, EGI Foundation, ENVRI-Hub NEXT Project Director

ENVRI-Hub NEXT Webinar: Harmonising Access to ECV Observations

On 15 January 2026, ENVRI-Hub NEXT presented its work during the second iClimateAction webinar. Marta Gutierrez (EGI Foundation) introduced the ENVRI community and the ENVRI-Hub NEXT project, with technical contributions from Anca Hienola (Finnish Meteorological Institute) and Ulrich Bundke (Forschungszentrum Jülich).

The presentation highlighted how ENVRI brings together Europe’s major environmental research infrastructures, collecting ground-based observations across the atmosphere, land, oceans, and ecosystems. These observations play a critical role in the climate data value chain. However, a persistent challenge is that high-quality data often remains difficult to find and use together due to differing formats, access protocols, and terminologies across infrastructures.

ENVRI-Hub NEXT addresses this by providing a common access layer that connects these distributed infrastructures without centralising their data. A key focus is on Essential Climate Variables (ECVs): scientists from different research infrastructures work together to map their existing measurements to the ECVs defined by GCOS, ensuring that data from diverse sources can be compared and combined reliably.

The discussion also emphasised usability. For many users, downloading entire datasets is neither practical nor necessary. ENVRI-Hub NEXT is therefore developing targeted access capabilities, allowing researchers to extract precisely the data they need—by location, time period, or variable—and use it directly within their analysis tools, without needing to master each infrastructure’s system in detail.

Bringing ENVRI Perspectives to the Harwell Meeting

Building on this webinar, Marta Gutierrez, Anca Hienola, Alex Vermeulen (ICOS) and Cathrine Lund Myhre (ACTRIS) represented the ENVRI-Hub NEXT consortium at the in-person GCOS-WGClimate-iClimateAction Joint Meeting in Harwell, UK (9–13 February 2026). There, they shared perspectives from the ENVRI community, contributing to discussions aimed at strengthening the technical basis for future climate reporting, planning, and coordination under the next phase of iClimateAction.

The meeting brought together specialists in climate observations, data, and knowledge systems from GCOS, WMO, GEO, and partner organisations, working collectively to support the delivery of the new GCOS Status Report.The ENVRI community contributed with the expertise and key contributions from the in-situ networks they operate and the ECVs that they have to offer.

This engagement underscores ENVRI-Hub NEXT’s commitment to advancing global interoperability for climate research, ensuring that Europe’s environmental research infrastructures are not only connected but actively contributing to international frameworks and policy needs.

Learn more about iClimateAction: https://wmo.int/iclimateaction