NWO Provides Funding for Cutting-Edge Research Infrastructure in Netherlands

8 Mar 2023 - 2 min

On 20 February 2023, NWO announced that they will provide 140 million euros of funding to nine projects that aim to establish or enhance large-scale research infrastructures. These projects were chosen in the context of the National Roadmap for Large-Scale Research Facilities, which outlines investment priorities for the next decade. The Netherlands eScience Center is involved in two of these projects, namely SSHOC-NL and LTER-LIFE.

LTER-LIFE, led by Professor Marcel Visser of NIOO-KNAW, is centred on developing a Virtual Research Environment that will enable ecologists to link scattered long-term data on plants, animals and the environment, share methods for data analysis, modelling and simulation, and build digital replicas of entire ecosystems, or “Digital Twins”. This will transform the ability to understand and predict how ecosystems will respond under different scenarios and mitigation measures, leading to scientific breakthroughs and societal impact.

SSHOC-NL is a collaboration between ODISSEI (Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations) and CLARIAH (Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and fifteen national partners. It aims to make it possible for researchers to securely and ethically link and analyse a wide range of data, such as historical records, text data, images, survey data and social media data. This will help address some of the most pressing issues that society faces, such as polarization, social inequalities and our changing environment.

These projects are part of the National Roadmap for Large-Scale Research Facilities, which outlines the Dutch research field’s investment priorities for large-scale research infrastructure for the next ten years. The funding provided by the National Roadmap will help the Netherlands continue to be a leader in scientific research and innovation.

As the Dutch national centre of expertise for research software, The Netherlands eScience Center is proud to be a part of these ground-breaking initiatives. It will contribute to both projects by providing research software engineering support. Our partnership will facilitate novel capabilities and perspectives on ecosystem modeling for LTER-LIFE, and bridge the gap between researchers and infrastructure for SSHOC-NL.

Read NWO’s own news article here to read about all the projects that were granted.