We are delighted to announce that in September 2026, the Collaborative Open Omics (COPO) project team commenced collaboration with the NERC Environmental Omics Facility (NEOF) and Research Software Engineering (RSE) teams from the University of Sheffield (UoS) on the Shared Data Infrastructure for Climate Biodiversity Research (ARIA TA4) project, supported by funding from the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).
The project is led by Professor Terry Burke from UoS and the Earlham Institute (EI), with Dr. Felix Shaw as the lead collaborator and head of the COPO team.
With an estimated funding exceeding £1 million, the grant will support the project for two years and will run until August 2028. Its aim is to develop a practical, reliable and efficient way for research teams involved in ARIA Technical Areas (TA1, TA3 and TA5) to collect, analyse, document, check and share biodiversity research data in line with internationally recognised standards and Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) principles.
Moreover, the project will demonstrate how shared approaches and consistent standards can help maintain high scientific quality while minimising the additional time and effort required from individual research teams to manage their data.
The main project objectives are to produce research outputs that are reproducible (i.e. allowing others to repeat the work) and verifiable (i.e. allowing others to check the results) and supporting accelerated adaptation research across the technical areas.
The expected outcomes include:
- A published Accelerated Adaptation Model (AAM) data standard adopted by the majority of the research teams.
- Open-source analytical tools and workflows, alongside training materials that can be used by the wider research community.
- A scalable approach to managing and sharing biodiversity research data that is reliable, trustworthy and requires minimal additional effort from research teams.
- Greater international collaboration on biodiversity data standards, including co-ordination with organisations and initiatives such as Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and Minimum Information About Plant Phenotyping Experiment (MIAPPE).
The project will be delivered through six work packages (WP1-WP6) where -
The NEOF and RSE teams will contribute to:
- WP1 - Programme Management, Co-design and TA1 Engagement: Co-ordinating the project and working with research teams to understand their requirements.
- WP3 - Bioinformatics Pipelines and Analytical Protocols: Developing data analysis workflows and providing relevant training.
- WP4 - Independent Verification: Checking research outputs through independent re-analysis to help ensure that results can be reproduced and verified.
- WP6 - Training and Low-Burden Integration: Supporting the adoption of the project tools and approaches while keeping the additional workload for research teams to a minimum.
The COPO team will contribute to:
- WP2 - Shared Data Schema and Reporting Standards: Developing consistent approaches to organising, describing and reporting research data.
- WP5 - Dashboards and Analytics: Developing dashboards and analytical tools to help research teams access, explore and understand their data.
- WP6 - Training and Low-Burden Integration: Supporting onboarding, data management and the integration of the project infrastructure into research activities.
Through this collaboration, the teams will combine their expertise in research data management, bioinformatics, software development and biodiversity science to deliver practical tools and approaches that support more open, reliable and reproducible research.