8 May 2026
How are Europe's climate, air quality and ecosystems changing? Answering questions like these often requires vast amounts of data - and this is exactly where a European project involving Forschungszentrum Jülich comes in. With the launch of the ENVRI Hub, researchers now have access to a central platform that brings together and provides environmental data from across Europe.
The Hub was unveiled at the EGU General Assembly 2026 in Vienna, one of the world's largest geoscience conferences. Every year, thousands of researchers gather there to present and discuss the latest developments in climate, environmental and Earth system research.
Access to a wide range of environmental data
The ENVRI Hub serves as a shared online portal for environmental research data. Instead of having to collect information from numerous individual databases, researchers can now find, combine and analyse data in one central location.
The platform connects datasets from a wide range of fields, including the atmosphere, soils, oceans and biodiversity. It also provides tools that help users better understand and process the data.
Through a dedicated programming interface and a Python library, researchers can even access the Hub directly from their usual working environment, search for datasets and download them automatically.
Jülich contributes key technical expertise
Forschungszentrum Jülich plays a central role in the development of the ENVRI Hub. Key technical components are being developed and integrated there to ensure that the platform operates reliably.
Jülich was already heavily involved in the predecessor project ENVRI-FAIR. Prof. Dr Andreas Petzold from the Institute of Climate and Energy Systems - Troposphere (ICE-3) coordinated the project and contributed his expertise to the development of the current platform. This work is now continuing within the follow-up project ENVRI-Hub NEXT.
At the same time, Petzold coordinates the European research infrastructure IAGOS, an international measurement network that uses sensors aboard commercial aircraft to collect data on air quality and climate change. IAGOS is closely linked to the development of the ENVRI Hub.
Within the current project, the Jülich team is helping to ensure that different datasets are compatible and can be shared efficiently.
"We are bringing together a wide range of services in a way that makes them easy for researchers to use," explains Dr Ulrich Bundke from ICE-3, technical coordinator of the project in Jülich. "This creates a stable foundation for collaborative environmental data research across Europe."
Better data for informed decisions
The benefits of the ENVRI Hub extend beyond research itself. Better and more easily accessible data can support informed decision-making in politics, industry and society - for example in climate protection, natural resource management and adaptation to environmental change.
In the long term, the Hub is intended to become part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), an initiative aimed at making scientific data freely accessible across Europe - much like a shared cloud infrastructure for research.
An important milestone has already been reached: the ENVRI Hub has been selected as a "Candidate Node" within the EOSC. This means it is among the projects expected to play a central role in Europe's future research data infrastructure.
Starting point for further development
The launch marks the beginning of the next phase. Researchers are now testing the platform in practical applications and continuing to develop it further. At the conference in Vienna, the ENVRI Hub will therefore not only be presented, but also tested extensively in demonstrations and training sessions.
