Data Rescue and Resilience
PANGAEA welcomes collaboration with scientists and data centres internationally to identify, preserve, and provide continued access to Earth and Environmental Science datasets at risk of becoming unavailable or considered valuable enough to justify redundancy. If you hold, manage, or are aware of data that may be at risk, please contact us.
Find all datasets already covered by our efforts.
PANGAEA Data Rescue Initiative 2025
Starting in 2025, the United States has been facing unprecedented budget cuts to federal science agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). These cuts specifically target climate research, environmental monitoring, and public health data programs, with significantly reduced funding for data services and websites.
In response, members of the scientific community—both within and outside the U.S.—approached PANGAEA to help preserve critical data products that were at immediate risk of being decommissioned. This includes the potential loss of data availability and the shutdown of data portals, which makes it much harder to locate and access existing datasets.
Consequently, PANGAEA initiated data rescue efforts in agreement with the respective data providers by following the FAIR data principles. The following two approaches have been applied:
1. Stabilising Links to NOAA Scientific Documents and Images:
For existing PANGAEA datasets that reference NOAA-hosted documents or images, we downloaded the documents/images and replaced unstable direct NOAA links with permanent links provided through PANGAEA’s infrastructure. This ensures continued accessibility even if NOAA pages are taken offline.
2. Permanent Archiving of NOAA Data Products:
We have directly archived various NOAA datasets that were scheduled to be decommissioned, ensuring they remain publicly accessible and easy to find.
PANGAEA Data Rescue and Resilience (from 2026)
PANGAEA is involved in data rescue and resilience activities through emerging formal and informal collaborations. The initiative identifies datasets of high international value that may be at risk in the event of political or institutional changes.
Rather than responding to data loss risks through reactive, ad-hoc rescue efforts, the initiative seeks to establish a coordinated and proactive approach to data preservation. A key objective is to develop redundant data pools across Europe and beyond and to promote “smart redundancy” among data infrastructures.
By strengthening distributed data preservation, these activities aim to enhance the resilience of research data infrastructures and ensure long-term access to valuable scientific data. We contribute to the development of the Global Data Resilience Roadmap initiated by the American Geophysical Union and are actively involved in Data Resilience Pilots.