"Fearing what might happen to the data that catalogues the details of climate change in an administration with so many climate deniers, researchers rush to save it."

"More than 250 people gathered at the University of Pennsylvania last week for Data Rescue Philly, one of the latest examples of a grassroots effort to save environmental and climate  change data that scientists fear could vanish under the Trump administration's many climate deniers.

Over two days, volunteers from academia, nonprofits and the tech industry were trained and then preserved data from more than 3,000 websites hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Bethany Wiggin, director of the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities (PPEH), said the idea emerged from conversations recalling how government data became less accessible during the George W. Bush administration. Wiggin said a scan of agency websites showed that some data sets were archived in multiple locations, while others were more vulnerable."

Lisa Song and Zahra Hirji report for InsideClimate News January 20, 2017. [2]