Research Guides: Earth & Environmental Sciences : Data

Notice regarding availability of some public data

Some U.S. federal agencies and initiatives are modifying publicly available data and some datasets may not be accessible on their sites at this time. Look for a notice on visible web pages.

For websites/datasets that appear to be inaccessible, here are some archives you could check:

Public Environmental Data Partners
Preserving and providing public access to federal environmental data. We are a volunteer coalition of several environmental, justice, and policy organizations, researchers across several universities, archivists, and students who rely on federal datasets and tools to support critical research, advocacy, policy, and litigation work.
Internet Archive
Preserving Public U.S. Federal Data
Finding Government Information during the 2025 Administration Transition
A compilation of current data rescue efforts and alternative data sources has been compiled by University of Minnesota Libraries
Data Rescue Project
A coordinated effort among a group of data organizations to provide a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk.
Data Rescue Project Data Tracker
A collaborative tool built to catalog existing public data rescue efforts
Syracuse University Library Numeric Data Resources
Sage Data (UM Subscription)
everything in Sage Data is archived.
Policy Commons
Coherent Digital archives all documents in their products, including Policy Commons. This resource includes some U.S. government reports, but not data, and the focus is on think tanks and NGOs.
Find Lost Data
An easy way to search for datasets across various sites. We emphasize ease of use to enable equitable access to these essential data.

Data Management Planning

Data Management across Research Lifecycle Stages (RDSI)
Data stewardship practices by research life cycle stage to help save time, address funder requirements, and maximize research impact.
CARE Principles of Indigenous Data Governance
FAIR Principles in Scientific Data
NSF Directorate for Geosciences (GEO) Data Policies
USGS Data Management
Library Data Services
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Research Data Services is a network of services throughout the library to assist you during all phases of the research data lifecycle. From preparing data management plans for grant proposals to sharing and preserving data, we provide resources to help you with your data.

For research data questions or to schedule a consultation, please email us at ResearchDataServices@umich.edu.
Data Management Plan Building Tool
Research Data Management tips

Data Repositories

Repositories are online resources that allow researchers to place their data in a secure location in order to enhance sharing and to meet mandates of granting agencies. These are also resources for locating data sets. Many repositories are discipline-specific, though some generalist repositories are also available.

Deep Blue This link opens in a new window
U-M's generalist institutional repository. Provides access and preservation services for digital documents or data

Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA)
A collaborative data infrastructure of three complementary data systems – EarthChem, LEPR, SESAR
Geoscience Data Exchange (GDEX)
Serves as a repository for open-access datasets funded by, or of relevance to, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Geosciences Directorate. It is a community resource enabling data providers to comply with federal and publisher Open Data mandates and to meet FAIR Guiding Principles for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable data. A Trusted Data Repository certification application has been submitted. Capacity limits are greater than existing general-purpose repositories; both small- and large-volume datasets (tens or even hundreds of terabytes) may be accepted.
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Current GDEX holdings include datasets from all NCAR Labs as well as from the Index of Chamber Atmospheric Research in the US (ICARUS); GDEX has also been designated as the repository for data from NSF Community Instrument Facilities and the Atmospheric Science and Chemistry mEasurement NeTwork (ASCENT). Other data providers can name NCAR as a collaborator on the data management portion of grant proposals, or use the standardized System Use Rate now pending NSF approval. There are costs for data storage that are substantially less than that for commercial cloud services, with zero egress charges, and there is cost recovery for data ingest processing depending on the volume, complexity, and heterogeneity of the data.NCAR launched the Geoscience Data Exchange (GDEX) in January 2022 to address the increasing demand for archival repository space for Earth system science data. The project – an expansion and rebranding of the former DASH Repository – is a response to the need to provide open access as required by federal policy, funding agencies, and scientific publishers, and to support scientific reproducibility and secondary use of data for new research.GDEX is designed to support NCAR projects and also external, NSF-funded projects such as Community Instruments and Facilities (CIFs), the Index of Chamber Atmospheric Research in the United States (ICARUS), and other geoscience data collections that require data archiving, preservation, and open access.
GSA Data Repository on Figshare
GSA Publications Supplemental Materials
Zenodo
General-purpose open repository developed under the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN. Deposit research papers, data sets, research software, reports, and any other research related digital artifacts.
Domain-Discipline Repositories Useful to AGU Journals
Critical Minerals in Ores - geochemistry database
This database contains geochemical analyses of over 7000 samples collected from or near mineral deposits from 60 countries, compiled by the Critical Minerals Mapping Initiative (CMMI), a collaboration between Geoscience Australia (GA), the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

Data Directories

Open Access Directory Data Repositories
re3data.org (Registry of Research Data Repositories)
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e3data.org is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It presents repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions. re3data.org promotes a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data. The registry went live in autumn 2012 and is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
The Reference Guide to Data Sources
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Provides an introduction to the most commonly used resources on a particular topic. It mostly covers social sciences topics and Earth sciences but would come in handy if someone was curious about something like where to look for real estate data.

Metadata Standards

Metadata Standards are specifications for the minimum information that should be collected about research data in order for it to be re-used

Metadata schemes (also called schema) are sets of metadata elements designed for a specific purpose, such as describing a particular type of information resource.

Data Management (Books)

Last Updated: Apr 3, 2025 10:47 AM

Subjects: Science

Tags: earth, environment, environmental, geological sciences