Big Earth Data Projects (CASEarth; http://www.casearth.com) is a key project to make research data in the fields of biology, ecology, environment and resource science in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) converge in a synthesis facility, to serve data driving fundamental research and decision making in China. The project was launched January 1, 2018 and funded by CAS. Data sharing is one of most important issues in the project, which is not only a prerequisity, but also a symbol for success in the big data era. A series of regulations refering to the data sharing policy in the CASEarch Project of CAS have been drafted and implemented in the project, including data quality contral, data submitting, data evaluation, data sharing to scientists and decision makers. Dozens of data sets have been re-arranged and submitted to a centralized data warehouse since June 2018, successfully aggregating >250 volumes of detailed monographs of fauna and flora, biodiversity red lists and maps, invasive species data, 3D imagery of specimens, a microbial culture catalogue, genomic data for agricultural/domestic and wild species, checklists and introducing records for botanical gardens, vegetation maps, biodiversity monitoring, nature reserves, wetland birds distribution and conservation, plant phenology (1960-present), ecosystems, paleontological data, and fundamental geographic data such as population, economy, land use, and remote sensing. The Catalogue of Life – China, a species checklist, is the backbone of the biodiversity data sets above. Our data sharing platform (http://data.casearth.cn), launched January 15, 2019, currently houses 5 PB of data. Registration is open to all, and registered users can browse metadata or keyword search on the platform and download data. Although the portal is currently available in Chinese, an English portal will be launched in 2020.

CASEarth, data sharing, policy, platform

Liqiang Ji