EnviStor

EnviStor is an NSF-funded data repository with 2.7 PB computing infrastructure for supporting collaborative interdisciplinary research on South Florida's built and natural environments. This repository expands upon FIU's existing research data management framework built on the Harvard-developed Dataverse (see also rdm.fiu.edu) and incorporates the data visualization and processing capabilities of the FIU CED-GIS Center (Coastal Environment Data and Geographic Information System Center), such as the geo-data. Furthermore, EnviStor operates a HITL multi-agent agentic-AI platform to assist in data exploration, cataloging, cleaning, and metadata creation.

Currently, the project team is working on several main areas of climate and environmental data management, streaming, and visualization:

1. Real-time South Florida saltwater intrusion buoy data (pilot in progress);
2. Time-series climate data;
3. Videos from underwater autonomous vehicles;
4. Wall of Wind NICHE data;
5. Time-series remotely sensed imagery data;
6. Storm surge and flood simulation data and models.

See what's already published, with verified statistics and spatial coverage, on the Data page.

The EnviStor system connects to the NSF federated data computing system "Pelican", as well as FIU's research computing resources — the Reconfigurable Advanced Platform for Transdisciplinary Open Research (RAPTOR), the AI Pavilion, and the dPanther hosting environment — to support nationwide Open Science data federation. The FIU CED-GIS Center plays an essential role in configuring and implementing the EnviStor IT framework, as well as in AI-assisted data management, dashboard creation, metadata management, and web application development for the user interface of EnviStor.

This Standard Operating Procedure sets forth procedures for the flow of datasets (geospatial and non-geospatial) through the FIU EnviStor infrastructure. It contains workflows for adding/publishing datasets/items through the EnviStor HITL multi-agent agentic-AI platform, which can automate the following tasks:

1. Automated metadata generation and publishing datasets in Dataverse;
2. Data visualization applications, e.g. ArcGIS Online;
3. Advanced computational tasks, e.g. data/image processing;
4. Connection to the OSDF/Pelican federation.

Publication to Dataverse, ArcGIS Online, and Pelican is part of the standard FAIR publication workflow. EnviStor offers two service tiers:

In both tiers, publication to a public endpoint always includes a human approval gate.

As a first step, make sure that you and your team have authenticated access to upload data to EnviStor (download instructions: EnviStor rclone configuration guide), and contact Julian Garcia (juligarc@fiu.edu) and Ernesto Rivas (erivas@fiu.edu).

For batch data upload, please prepare your data information in the spreadsheet for the EnviStor Agency/Third-Party datasets or EnviStor FIU research data metadata elements datasheets. If you have any questions relating to the metadata generation within Dataverse, please contact Sonia Santana Arroyo or Rebecca Bakke at rdm@fiu.edu.

For questions relating to the agentic-AI platform workflow, please contact Boyuan Guan (bguan@fiu.edu).

For Pelican/OSPool access, please contact Dr. Leonardo Bobadilla (bobadilla@cs.fiu.edu).