Data Refuge is a public, collaborative project designed to address the following concerns about federal climate and environmental data:

What are the best ways to safeguard data?
How do federal agencies play crucial roles in data collection, management, and distribution?
How do government priorities impact data’s accessibility?
Which projects and research fields depend on federal data?
Which data sets are of value to research and local communities, and why?

DataRefuge is also an initiative committed to identifying, assessing, prioritizing, securing, and distributing reliable copies of federal climate and environmental data so that it remains available to researchers. Data collected as part of the #DataRefuge initiative will be stored in multiple, trusted locations to help ensure continued accessibility.

DataRefuge acknowledges--and in fact draws attention to--the fact that there are no guarantees of perfectly safe information. But there are ways that we can create safe and trustworthy copies. DataRefuge is thus also a project to develop the best methods, practices, and protocols to do so.

DataRefuge depends on local communities. We work in partnership with Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI), Climate Mirror, ProjectARCC, and with local collaborators at #ProtectClimateData and other DataRescue events.

This is the data catalog for DataRefuge. To view the Data Refuge website, click here

Please note that the workflow developed in January that has populated most of the datasets found here is no longer being supported as of May 21, 2017. Please contact us with questions.

Code for the Data Refuge CKAN theme can be found here.