Swathes of scientific data deletions are sweeping across US government websites – with decades of health, climate change and extreme weather research at risk. Now, scientists are racing to save their work before it's lost.

Some of them are in the US. Others are scattered around the world. There are hundreds, many even thousands of people involved across multiple networks. And they keep a damn close eye on their phones.

No one knows when the next alert or request to save a chunk of US government-held climate data will come in. Such data, long available online, keeps getting taken down by US President Donald Trump's administration. For the last six months or so, Cathy Richards has been entrenched in the response. She works for one of several organisations bent on downloading and archiving public data before it disappears.

"You get a message at 11 o'clock at night saying, 'This is going down tomorrow'," she says. "You try to enjoy your day and then everything goes wrong. You just spend the night downloading data."

Richards is a data and inclusion specialist, and civic science fellow at the Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP), a non-profit based in Hudson, New York. Her organisation is a founding member of the Public Environmental Data Project (PEDP), which emerged in 2024 to safeguard data under the Trump administration.

Some of the messages are "heart-breaking", says Richards. Scientists sometimes get in touch, desperate to know that data they have spent their professional lives collecting will be rescued. "You hear the urgency," she says. "You understand that this is someone's X amount of years of research and this is their baby. That's probably why we snap into action."

In recent weeks, Richards and her colleagues have archived datasets packed with information on US flood hazards, greenhouse gas emissions, energy production and environmental justice, among other subjects. Other researchers have recreated a tool that forecasts the risk of future climate hazards around the US.

This rush to safeguard vital environmental data is part of a broader movement to rescue all kinds of scientific data published online by the US government. Biomedical and health researchers working with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for example, have been frantically searching for ways to back up important data following executive orders issued by Trump about what information on gender and diversity may be published by federal bodies.

Scientists have expressed fears about a wide range of resources that might go next – from historical weather records to data gathered by Nasa satellites. On 16 April, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) announced that a list of datasets regarding ocean monitoring were now scheduled to be removed in early May.

Multiple organisations including the Internet Archive, a non-profit, Safeguarding Research and Culture, and the Data Rescue Project, are now engaged in activities alongside the OEDP to rescue this data from oblivion. Many of the individuals involved in these efforts have pitched in voluntarily. "It's our library," says Richards. "You gotta save the books, you have to keep it for the future."

Shortly after President Trump's inauguration on 25 January 2025, his administration announced sweeping changes to federal departments and agencies, in a bid to reduce what it called "waste" and "inefficiencies". But many of the programmes and resources........

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