Over two days, volunteers from academia, nonprofits and the tech industry were trained and then preserved data from more than 3,000 websites hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Bethany Wiggin, director of the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities (PPEH), said the idea emerged from conversations recalling how government data became less accessible during the George W. Bush administration. Wiggin said a scan of agency websites showed that some data sets were archived in multiple locations, while others were more vulnerable.
Those concerns prompted PPEH and Penn Libraries to launch DataRefuge, which approaches the problem like a libraries project, placing “multiple copies [of data] in multiple places,” Wiggin said.
“The main goal is to make sure climate change research doesn’t slow down.”
A recent move by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to remove references to climate change from its website adds urgency to scientists’ concerns. In December, researchers and software engineers held a “guerrilla archiving event” in Toronto that focused on preserving Environmental Protection Agency data, and the leader of that effort attended Data Rescue Philly to offer advice.
DataRefuge events took place this week in Chicago and Indianapolis. The project is open to anyone who wants to attend.
The Penn project was in collaboration with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), an international group of university researchers and nonprofits that formed after Donald Trump’s victory to coordinate data rescue efforts. The amount of climate-related information stored on federal websites is overwhelming, and includes vital satellite imagery, sea-ice records, pollution inventories and decades of scientific studies. Wiggin said it’s impossible to save everything, and the goal is to prioritize the data most at risk of removal.
InsideClimate News spoke to Wiggin about the motivations, challenges and hopes for the project……… https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19012017/climate-change-data-science-denial-donald-trump?platform=hootsuite
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