It was mid-November 2024, just a couple weeks after the federal election, when a group of environmental data scientists gathered to discuss what soon became an urgent issue: a potential Trump administration effort to scrub critical environmental data from federal agency websites.

Among them was Jessie Mahr, director of technology at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC). At the time, her work at the nonprofit startup mainly involved helping environmental agencies use tech tools for environmental health projects and identifying gaps in national policies. But at this meeting, attendees were discussing environmental data they expected to be at risk under the Trump administration.

“This problem seemed like too much to handle,” said Manuel Salgado, a federal research manager at the nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a New York-based advocacy organization, who was also on the call. “But Jessie heard a need from the community and just completely ran with it.”

Over the next three months, Mahr jumped to lead the nation’s most coordinated effort to archive federal datasets and rebuild data tools that communities, companies, nonprofits, agencies and investors rely on to inform decisions involving weather, water quality, disasters, air pollution, climate change and more. That included co-launching the Public Environmental Data Partners (PEDP): a coordinated initiative to preserve and provide public access to federal environmental data.

Her head start paid off. Just days after Trump’s inauguration, federal databases and websites started to disappear. By January 24, PEDP’s website went live with two tools that had already been purged.

“It was the most needed thing at the time,” said Ryan Hathaway, who previously worked as an environmental justice director in the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. Now that hundreds of datasets have been archived, including many that haven’t yet been deleted but are at risk, “we don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” he added.

As of September, PEDP had archived seven tools and 362 datasets — with 75 more in progress, Mahr told Forbes. The smallest datasets can take just a few hours to archive; the largest can take several weeks.

Among the most widely used (and first to be deleted) was the federal Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool — nicknamed CEJST — that uses climate and environmental health data to identify risks in specific communities. Salgado’s work leans heavily on this tool for creating maps of where these risks overlap with race in low-income communities. But when the Trump administration dismantled the tool in January, Salgado lost access. Now, when he........

© Forbes