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Data rescue is a movement among scientists, researchers and others to preserve primarily government-hosted data sets, often scientific in nature, to ward off their removal from publicly available websites. While the concept of preserving federal data existed before, it gained new impetus with theelection in 2016 of U.S. PresidentDonald Trump. As Trump reemerged in 2025, there were renewed concerns about the need for data rescue.[1]
The concept of harvesting and preserving federal web pages began as early as 2008, at the conclusion of PresidentGeorge W. Bush's second term, under the name "End of Term Presidential Harvest."[2]
Soon after Trump's election, scientists, librarians and others in the U.S. and Canada—fearing that the administration of Trump (who had denied the validity of the scientific consensus on the existence ofclimate change[3]) would act to remove scientific data from government websites[4]—began working to preserve those data.
Quickly, the concept of data rescue became a grassroots movement, with organized "hackathon" events at cities across the U.S. and elsewhere, often hosted at universities and other institutions of higher education.
TheGuerrilla Archiving Event: Saving Environmental Data from Trump was a meeting arranged by two professors at theUniversity of Toronto in December 2016,[5][6] in an effort to pre-emptively preserve US government climate data from possible deletion by thefirst Trump Administration.[7][8]
During hisrun for presidency, President Trump expressed, in various occasions,climate change denialism[9] callingclimate change a "Chinese hoax" "in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive", and voiced his hostility towardsclimate science andParis climate agreement.[10][11] In early December 2016, a prominent climate change denier,Scott Pruitt was selected as a new administrator of theUnited States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).[12] These proceedings raised concerns among the academic community that thescientific opinion on climate change might be suppressed during Trump's presidency. Indeed, according to Reuters sources, on 25 January 2017, Trump's administration instructed theUnited States Environmental Protection Agency to remove climate change page from their website.[13]
Fearing for possible deletion or alteration of the US government websites containing government climate data, as happened in Canada[citation needed], people from various academic backgrounds and training such as coders, environmental scientists, social scientists, archivists, and librarians gathered together in order to save US government websites at risk of changing or disappearing during or after government transition.[14][15] The event collaborated with theInternet Archive's End of Term project.[16][17]
Climate Mirror is "an open project to mirror public climate datasets",[18] that is, anopen access project tomirror (toback up) thedata ofpublicly owneddatasets fromclimate science, such as data from U.S.federally funded research. Datasets from theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), theEnvironmental Protection Agency (EPA), andNASA are considered primary examples.
The idea behind Climate Mirror is comparable to the notion thatlots of copies keep stuff safe from disappearing throughcensorship,link rot, lapses ofprofessionalism in preserving the integrity of thescientific record, or lack ofdigital permanence. It offers a parallel type of massive backup.