Open Monitoring, Documenting, and Responding to the Removal of Environmental Data

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) leverages research and online tools to monitor, document, and respond to the anticipated undermining of evidence-based environmental governance. EDGI is committed to tracking changes to US federal environmental management and governance, in a range of agencies including EPA, NOAA, NASA, USGS, OSHA, DoE and BLM, among many others.

EDGI brings together North American social scientists, environmental and physical scientists, lawyers, and other information and environmental professionals to document and advocate for the vital importance of evidence-based environmental policy. Through three core working groups EDGI analyzes changes to federal agencies' 1) funding and regulation, 2) personnel and research and 3) public data.

Through the third working group, EDGI has been a leading partner in the international effort to preserve and track federal environmental data, and support environmental scientists, non-profit organizations, and foundations by making this data publicly available. We are also indexing millions of government web pages on a weekly basis, tracking changes to them, and producing regular reports. With data collection efforts well underway and supported by many hundreds of volunteers at events across North America, our focus now turns to building first-rate tools to support our work. We need deep thinkers to develop protocols for the resilient, sustainable, accessible, distributed data storage networks of the future; machine learning experts to sift through millions of web pages to find the most important changes; and security specialists to protect the privacy of our volunteers and ensure the integrity of our data. We believe this work is essential to preserving the integrity of scientific research in the US, and also builds a new level of transparency and government accountability to citizens.