"Frontier environmental research increasingly depends on a wide range of data and advanced capabilities to process and analyse them. The ENVRI project, “Common Operations of Environmental Research infrastructures” is a collaboration in the ESFRI Environment Cluster, with support from ICT experts, to develop common e-science components and services for their facilities. The results will speed up the construction of these infrastructures and will allow scientists to use the data and software from each facility to enable multi-disciplinary science.The target is on developing common capabilities including software and services of the environmental and e-infrastructure communities. While the ENVRI infrastructures are very diverse, they face common challenges including data capture from distributed sensors, metadata standardisation, management of high volume data, workflow execution and data visualisation. The common standards, deployable services and tools developed will be adopted by each infrastructure as it progresses through its construction phase.Two use cases, led by the most mature infrastructures, will focus the development work on separate requirements and solutions for data pre-processing of primary data and post-processing toward publishing. The project will be based on a common reference model created by capturing the semantic resources of each ESFRI-ENV infrastructure. This model and the development driven by the testbed deployments result in ready-to-use systems which can be integrated into the environmental research infrastructures.The project puts emphasis on synergy between advanced developments, not only among the infrastructure facilities, but also with ICT providers and related e-science initiatives. These links will facilitate system deployment and the training of future researchers, and ensure that the inter-disciplinary capabilities established here remain sustainable beyond the lifetime of the project."