CLUES links environmental and health data
Environmental factors such as climate, water and air quality can affect both our physical and mental health. Until now, however, environmental and health datasets have been fragmented and difficult to combine in order to examine their overlap. CLUES now makes this possible. We spoke with Dr. Marcel Jentsch, Dr. Elli Polemiti, and Dr. Sven Twardziok about their project.
What problem were you trying to solve with this research project?
Understanding how our environment shapes our wellbeing is a central public health challenge we face. Air pollution, climate change, urban living, and socioeconomic factors all influence disease risk. Yet connecting these exposures to individual participant data has historically been slow, fragmented and technically demanding.
CLUES (Climate, Urbanicity, Environment and Society) was developed to address this gap. Built as part of the environMENTAL, an EU-funded project investigating the impact of environmental factors on brain health, CLUES is an open-source framework that automates the entire process: from selecting and downloading global environmental datasets, to harmonising them into a common format, to linking them directly to research cohorts and clinical studies. It adheres to FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) and privacy-compliant data protection principles. Researchers across disciplines can use it to systematically incorporate environmental context into their research, regardless of their technical background or geographic focus.
The work strongly resonates with the scientific vision of the Eils Lab at BIH Digital Health Center. The group is deeply committed to advancing data-driven and AI-enabled biomedical research through the integration of large-scale clinical, molecular, and multimodal datasets. CLUES allows complex data to be transformed into actionable medical knowledge and exemplify the type of interdisciplinary science the lab actively promotes to improve the understanding of disease mechanisms and ultimately support more precise and personalized healthcare.
What are the FAIR-principles and how dies CLUS implement them?
The FAIR principles are widely adopted guidelines designed to improve how scientific data is managed, shared, and reused. Findability means data can be easily discovered; Accessibility ensures it can be obtained and used when needed; Interoperability allows it to work with other datasets and systems; and Reusability ensures it is well-described so it can be used again in different contexts.
These principles guided the development of CLUES from the outset. Findability is supported through a comprehensive, open-source registry of all variables and data sources included in CLUES. Accessibility is enhanced through automated downloads from multiple sources, reducing technical barriers and broadening the scope of available data. Interoperability is achieved through harmonisation of data types, coordinate reference systems, and spatial boundaries across datasets, enabling consistent use of data across tools and studies. Finally, Reusability is supported using structured configuration files that enables reproducible database creation and consistent data processing across projects and teams.
How does CLUES ensure data protection?
In cohort and clinical studies, sensitive data such as geolocation information often cannot be shared externally due to privacy restrictions and therefore must be processed locally within institutional environments. CLUES is designed with this in mind: the linkage between individual-level data and environmental exposures can be performed entirely within authorized institutional settings, eliminating the need for external data transfer and reducing privacy risk. This ensures that researchers can benefit from rich environmental data while remaining fully compliant with data protection regulations, such as GDPR.
What surprised you, and if so, why? What was new?
What surprised us was the scale of the gap. Despite the critical role that environmental exposures play in shaping both physical and mental health, integrating such data into biomedical research remains highly complex, largely because there were still no established end-to-end workflows. Although a wealth of environmental data already exists openly accessible from initiatives such as NASA, Copernicus and DLR, most biomedical researchers cannot use it in practice. Researchers face a patchwork of disconnected data sources, each with its own interface and format, or available tools require uploading sensitive participant location data to external cloud services, something which is simply not permitted under GDPR.
CLUES addresses this directly by providing an open-source, end-to-end solution for generating individual-level environmental exposure data that works across global settings. This also connects to a broader and growing movement in exposome research, which measures all environment exposures a person experiences throughout their lifetime. Initiatives such as the GA4GH Human Exposome Data Standards are working to established shared international standards for capturing and comparing environmental exposure data across research groups worldwide. We see CLUES as a concrete step in that direction.
How do patients profit from this research?
Linking environmental data to individual health records opens a much more comprehensive picture of disease risk. It enables earlier detection and better prediction of future disease. In the context of personalised medicine, treatments and preventive measures can be tailored to a person’s actual environmental exposures, rather than relying solely on genetic or clinical data.
Beyond the individual level, the integration of environmental exposures into health research enables a better understanding of the causes of disease, informing more targeted public health measures and evidence-based policy interventions. It can also support healthcare systems in preparing for environmental challenges, for example, helping hospital anticipate and manage the health impacts of extreme weather events such as heatwaves or floods, which are becoming increasing frequent with climate change.