What is POLARIN:
POLARIN is a Horizon Europe (HORIZON) project that brings together a consortium of 50 institutions, coordinated by the German Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.
The project partners form an international network of polar research infrastructures and services to address scientific challenges of the polar regions. The network includes a wide array of complementary and interdisciplinary research infrastructures of the highest quality: Arctic and Antarctic research stations, research vessels and icebreakers operating at both poles, observatories, data infrastructures and ice and sediment core repositories. POLARIN will provide integrated, challenge-driven, and combined access to these infrastructures to facilitate interdisciplinary research on complex processes.
A total of 64 polar research facilities will be initially available for the network. Researchers will be able to access these facilities through a combination of three modes of access: in-person through Transnational Access (TA), through remotely requesting services such as sampling through Remote Access (RA), or by Virtually Accessing datasets from on-site observations (VA).
Early Career Researchers and young researchers are a specific target-group of POLARIN engagement and training, and the project aims to support and focus on the new generation of polar researchers where feasible.
Project start and period:
March 2024 - February 2029 (five years)
SIOS Involvement in the project:
SIOS is the leader of WP5, and a major contributor in 4 work packages: WP4, WP5, WP6 & WP7.
WP4 is titled "Improvement of data services and customized data products", and aims to facilitate the discovery and access to data already available at polar research infrastructures.
WP5 is titled "Provision of virtual access", and consists of development and maintenance of a portal for virtual access to research infrastructures, and evaluating and reporting on the use of this portal.
WP6 is titled "RIs offered for virtual access", and is about documenting and providing the means of connecting research infrastructures offered for virtual access to the portal developed in WP5.
WP7 is titled "Training for infrastructure users", and aims to develop training material for Polar RI users, to disseminate this material through seminars and courses, and to support capacity-building for FAIR data management for users of POLARIN infrastructures.
Homepage of the project: Expected to be launched in Q2/2024.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101130949.
