From preservation to perseverance: bridging disciplines for data resilience

What this was about

Andrea Thomer described how Earth science data infrastructures in the US moved from the passive threat of invisibility to active threats in 2025, when NOAA and other agency resources were taken offline and many staff lost their jobs. She presented three resilience efforts at different timescales: SESAR rescuing NOAA's Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples (IMLGS), the ESIP Repository Crisis Scorecards for self-assessment against four crisis scenarios, and an AGU-led, Hewlett-funded international initiative building roadmaps, business models and mutual aid networks. She concluded that resilience is about prioritisation, doing the best with what we have, and called for advocacy to keep infrastructure appropriately visible.

Why it matters. The Earth science community's experience of sudden defunding offers biodiversity informatics tested approaches (data rescue, crisis scorecards, mutual aid) and an invitation to collaborate.

In the room

• Infrastructure is invisible by design (Bowker and Star) and only noticed when it breaks, which makes maintenance hard to fund.
• In 2025 over 20 NOAA databases and data resources were taken offline after US federal budget cuts; half of her ESIP colleagues lost their jobs.
• SESAR mints IGSN persistent identifiers for physical samples and is being redesigned to serve biodiversity samples.
• Phase one of the IMLGS rescue recreated the portal as it was in January 2025 inside SESAR using GeoParquet; phase two will integrate the records into SESAR.
• The ESIP Repository Crisis Scorecards (a Qualtrics survey on ESIP's site and Zenodo) assess preparedness for natural disaster, loss of funding, cyber attack and loss of personnel.
• AGU's task groups work on business models, shared technical solutions, crisis preparedness kits and mutual aid agreements to take on one another's data.

Notable moments