The women saving America's climate data

A COUPLE OF WEEKS AFTER DONALD TRUMP WAS elected President for the second time, a group of federal data watchers gathered in Denice Ross’s dining room. As chief U.S. data scientist under the Biden Administration, Ross had a clear window into just how much information the government collects—whether monitoring a fleet of ocean buoys to guide safe shipping routes or tracking how vulnerable communities are to disaster—and just how useful it is.

- BY KYLA MANDEL

Over the course of that evening, Ross and her guests took down all the pictures decorating her walls, and in their place began sticking Post-It Notes mapping everything that could, in their view, go wrong if the Administration targeted the bedrock of science: the collection, analysis, and sharing of data. It had happened in 2017, and could happen again if Trump’s promises to undo climate policy (along with targeting other areas like health) were anything to go by.

Soon, the room was full of little paper squares detailing all the information that could be at risk, and ideas for how to monitor and protect against its possible dilution—or even its removal from public view. One year into Trump’s presidency, “pretty much everything has come to pass,” says Ross, now a senior adviser at the Federation of American Scientists, “except much quicker than I expected.”

It started the day after Trump’s Inauguration last year when the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool—launched under President Joe Biden—was taken offline. But not for long. Forty-eight hours later, it was resurrected by the Public Environmental Data Partners (PEDP), a new coalition launched in November 2024 to save federal data.

For over a year now, more than a dozen groups have been working together to rescue environment and climate data—and the majority are being led by women. Behind the scenes, countless other volunteers and organizations are plugging away, preferring to stay out of the limelight. They’re part of a vast web that’s emerged since President Trump’s election, made up of dozens of groups across sectors, all working to keep federal databases alive. So far, at least 360 environment-specific datasets have been backed up along with 311,000 datasets from data.gov, and nearly 710 terabytes of Smithsonian data. The list goes on.