EGI at EGU26: Advancing Federated Digital Services for Earth Science

The EGI Foundation participated in the EGU General Assembly 2026 in Vienna from 3 to 8 May. As a premier gathering for Earth, planetary, and space sciences, the event provided an essential forum for EGI to engage with the global research community and demonstrate the value of federated digital infrastructures. EGI also highlighted its portfolio of supported and customised services tailored to the needs of diverse research communities, alongside its active role in research and innovation, co-developing solutions and advancing methodologies in collaboration with scientific partners. This year’s presence was marked by a strategic focus on service accessibility and cross-project collaboration, aimed at supporting the next generation of environmental science.

To facilitate direct interaction with researchers, EGI maintained a dual presence in the exhibition area. At booth #05, the EGI Foundation welcomed hundreds of international scientists interested in leveraging scalable computing and data services. A primary focus of these discussions was EGI's access call, which provides a gateway for researchers to utilise high-performance digital services and expert support for data-intensive research. The booth also served as a showcase for our central role in key initiatives such as EOSC Beyond, EOSC Data Commons, RI-SCALE, and the EOSC EU Node building.

In parallel, EGI contributed to the management of the ENVRI Community booth (#27), which served as a vibrant meeting point for the environmental research infrastructures. Over the past 15 years, EGI has supported this community not only through robust digital infrastructure but also through sustained community-building and communication efforts. The booth acted as a true melting pot for the community, fostering exchange, visibility, and collaboration across domains. This collaborative space emphasised our coordinated project, ENVRI-Hub NEXT and our contributions to the IRISCC project. In particular, the recently upgraded ENVRI-Hub builds on EGI’s digital backbone, demonstrating how integrated services and innovation jointly underpin community-wide platforms. By bringing these elements together, EGI consolidated its presence within the wider Earth science community, offering both technical expertise and leadership in research and innovation for large-scale environmental infrastructures.

The EGI team (featuring Magdalena Brus, Ilaria Fava, Federico Drago, Andrea Manzi, and Marta Gutierrez) was also actively involved in the assembly’s scientific program. We co-convened two major sessions that addressed the technical and socio-technical challenges of modern geoscience.

The first session, ESSI2.5, focused on bridging Earth science research through integrated e-Infrastructures and Virtual Research Environments (VREs). Co-convened by Magdalena Brus, the discussions centred on transitioning from fragmented, stand-alone tools to interoperable systems, like Digital Twins, to better manage the research lifecycle. The second session, ITS1.20/ESSI4.3, hosted by our coordinated project, ENVRI-Hub NEXT, and co-convened by Federico Drago, explored the evolution of Essential Variables (EVs) into actionable decision support, highlighting the need for semantic frameworks and cross-scale architectures to link global observations to local climate solutions.

EGI members also contributed technical expertise through several oral presentations. Federico Drago and Marta Gutierrez contributed as co-authors on a presentation of the new ENVRI-Hub as a platform for integrated VREs. At the same time, Andrea Manzi shared lessons on research infrastructure platforms derived from the interTwin and RI-SCALE projects. In addition, Magdalena Brus contributed to a presentation exploring how research infrastructures and digital technologies can support climate risk insights for the finance and insurance sectors.

Further contributions addressed the critical need for federation in Earth system science and participated in the townhall discussion hosted by Data Terra and NFDI regarding the future of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), a topic that’s increasingly more relevant to our community, as we have recently been confirmed as one of the new official candidate EOSC nodes in April. 

We look forward to meeting the community again in Vienna next year and to supporting ambitious research projects through our services. Get in touch now!