Alejandro Coca-Castro
Hola, I'm Alejandro (he/him) โญ
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๐งช Research Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. My fellowship research focuses on the development of software for the intelligent fusion of environmental and climate data.
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๐ Lead of the Environmental Data Science book, a computational notebook community for Open Environmental Science.
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๐ฅ Core member of The Turing Way and scivision, and also an active member of the Pangeo Europe community meetings.
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๐ Mentee and mentor in Open Science projects through the Open Life Science programme.
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๐ Topic editor at the Journal of Open Source Education (JOSE).

Sessions
Audience
Anyone interested in Reproducible and Reusable Research outputs with FAIR executable notebooks.
Abstract
Environmental Data Science Book (or EDS Book) is a pan-european community-driven resource hosted on GitHub and powered by Jupyter Book. The resource leverages executable notebooks, regional cloud resources and technical implementations of the FAIR principles to support the publication of datasets, innovative research and open-source tools in environmental science. EDS book provides practical guidelines and templates that maximise open infrastructure services to translate research outputs into curated, interactive, shareable and reproducible executable notebooks which benefit from a collaborative and transparent reviewing process. Each notebook and its dependencies (input/output data, documentation, computational environments, etc.) are bundled into a Research Object (RO) and deposited to RoHub (a RO management platform) that provides the technical basis for implementing FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) executable notebooks.
To date, the community has successfully published multiple python-based notebooks covering a wide range of topics in environmental data science. The notebooks consume open-source python libraries e.g., Pangeo stack (intake
, iris
, xarray
) and Holoviz (hvplot
, panel
) for fetching, processing and interactively visualizing environmental research.
In future work, we expect to increase contributions showcasing scalable and interoperable open-source developments in other programming languages e.g Julia and R, and engage with computational notebooks communities and research networks interested in improving scientific software practices in environmental science.
What is the EDS book?
- A book: https://edsbook.org
- An open source project: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/environmental-ds-book
- A community: EDS book is also an open-source collaborative project that involves and supports its members of diverse skills and backgrounds to ensure that data science is accessible and useful for everyone interested in Environmental sciences.
Impact and outreach over last 12 months
- 10 executable notebooks (see the gallery in https://edsbook.org/notebooks/gallery.html)
- 24 contributors in the GitHub Host Repository
- 240 Twitter followers | 23 Mastodon followers
- Highlighted in the Supporting Pangeo: the community-driven platform for Big Data geoscience project page, https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/supporting-pangeo-community-driven-platform-big-data-geoscience
- Highlighted in a FOSS4G 2022 workshop aiming to teach the basics of Pangeo, an open-source stack suited for big geoscience data https://pangeo-data.github.io/foss4g-2022/afterword/envds-book.html
Outreach
Workshops/Hackathons
- Climate Informatics 2023 Reproducibility Challenge. Co-hosted by EDS book, Climate Informatics and Cambridge University Press & Assessment with support from Cambridge University, The Alan Turing Institute and Simula Research Laboratory, https://eds-book.github.io/reproducibility-challenge-2023/
Presentations
- European Geophysical Union 2023 (EGU23), https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU23/EGU23-13768.html
- Pangeo Community Showcase, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lhbU0vbhw0
- European Geophysical Union 2022 (EGU22), https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU22/EGU22-3739.html
- UK Conference on Environmental Data Science, https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/ceds/abstracts/abstracts-6th-july-22/#castro
- The Turing Way Fireside chat, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeeRZZ3-Stc
- AGU22, Open Science Practices and Success Stories Across the Earth, Space and Environmental Sciences session, https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm22/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/1072564