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talk · Tuesday 22 September · 09:11–⁠09:23 · ODIN

Supporting resilient data infrastructure in a changing environment

Rachael Blake · Building resilient data infrastructures for biodiversity science

Recording time 45:24–56:34Open on Vimeo ↗

Summaries and key moments are machine-produced. Check the recording for the speaker’s exact words.

The short versionTechnical copies are not enough: durable data infrastructure depends on preserved human expertise, messy maintenance work and data standardized close to collection.

Overview

What this was about

Rachael Blake reviews how sudden US funding and personnel changes in 2025 exposed fragile environmental data systems, with examples such as EJSCREEN, the NOAA Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database and Columbia's SEDAC being lost or rehosted. She describes how panic copying without metadata or context fragmented data, while informed rescuers rebuilt datasets on Zenodo, domain repositories or bespoke hosting (e.g. EPA Risk Management Plan data via Datasette). She then surveys efforts toward long-term resilient systems and argues for investing in human infrastructure, interoperability, federated networks and purpose-driven data products.

Why it matters. It distils lessons from the 2025 US data-rescue wave that biodiversity infrastructures can apply before a crisis hits.

Key ideas

In the room

  • In early 2025 the US community risked losing entire archives and repositories; patched fragile systems broke when funding and staff changed.
  • Examples: EJSCREEN (now hosted by Public Environmental Data Partners), the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database (now at Climate Central), SEDAC (shut down; data archived at NASA and Harvard Dataverse).
  • Panic copying without context or metadata fragmented data and did not support long-term interoperability or reuse.
  • Short-term recovery used domain and generalist repositories (much went to Zenodo) and bespoke architectures; EPA RMP data served via Datasette as SQLite.
  • Longer-term efforts: repository crisis scorecards, Climate Reserve at the Aspen Global Change Institute supporting former federal staff, the Council of Data Facilities on replication.
  • Coalitions: Coalition for Resilient Research Data Infrastructure, AGU Global Data Convening, Semantic Commons for Climate, Nature and Economy, World Ocean Database resilience effort.
  • Training the next generation of data stewards (e.g. an ocean data stewardship programme launched this year).
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Notable moments

In their words

Transcript

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Programme abstract

Supporting resilient data infrastructure in a changing environment

Rachael Blake

Recent concurrent losses of funding, people, and institutional support for U.S. environmental data infrastructure has forced a reckoning with the vulnerabilities of our previous systems. U.S. environmental data infrastructures, both human and technical, are more fragile than had been widely understood, often lacking sustainable funding, robust policies, and programmatic protections. Initial triage responses by data users and professionals were fragmented and relied heavily on copying data and information to repositories perceived as stable, often housed outside the U.S. As data rescue efforts expanded, we increased coordination and collaboration, and reduced fragmentation as groups communicated to share practices and identify high-priority datasets and products. In the last several months, the focus has shifted to improving the usability of data and products, including recreating and expanding lost environmental data services on new hosts. Data professionals have also built tools for assisting repositories in assessing resilience and planning for improved sustainability. Beyond the data itself, there has been a growing recognition that preserving and sharing knowledge about data infrastructures-methodologies, processes, and people, as well as analyses and applications-is critical for making data useful in the future. We will share reflections from a range of environmental data professionals and organizations on how to design and construct new data ecosystems that are more resilient and prepared for future challenges, and that preserve expertise, institutional knowledge and access to environmental data and knowledge.

Submitted to the conference programme before the talk, so the talk itself may differ.