Antarctic Research and Data Management in Finland

Management of Research Data and Open Science

According to the Antarctic Treaty, all states conducting research in Antarctica must ensure that research data is properly stored, freely available, and adequately described in an international database. Good data management and long‑term preservation are essential for supporting open science and enabling future research.

Metadata: Antarctic Master Directory and Fairdata.fi Portal

Research data collected from Antarctica should have metadata stored in a way that it is freely available, and a link to the actual data should be included in the description when the data is available.

Earlier the metadata has been described into the Antarctic Master Directory (AMD), but it is now recommended to be stored in the fairdata.fi portal organized by the Ministry of Education and Culture, where it is also possible to store the data itself.

AMD is part of NASA's EarthData Search and contains approximately 11,000 descriptions of research data collected from Antarctica. The system includes 53 Finnish metadata descriptions.

Submitting Metadata

• Using the Qvain tool to describe metadata into the Fairdata.fi portal.
• Data can be submitted using IDA tool.

Find Data and More Information:

• Finnish Research Data in Antarctic Master Directory and in
• Fairdata.fi portal 
• Metadata in AMD is also available in Google dataset search.
• Polar Data Search - amalgamation of multidisciplinary repositories that host some form of polar data, which are then indexed into a single search interface.
• Finnish Antarctic Research Program FINNARP

Contact

The Arctic Centre acts as a national contact point and provides guidance and training on metadata submission.

Arto Vitikka

firstname.lastname(at)ulapland.fi
Tel. +358 40 527 2436
Last updated: March 2026