2026/01/01 by A. M. de Sherbinin · 1 voice
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · #Data Analysis and Archiving #Research Data Management Practices #Scientific Computing and Data Management
paper · pdf · doi:10.5334/dsj-2026-009
openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/03/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/06
Chinua Achebe's award winning novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), chronicles the cultural disintegration that occurred during the early phases of the British colonization of Nigeria.Any moment of abrupt cultural change is unsettling, and its results are unpredictable.The same can be said of the current moment in which belief systems that were foundational in the new era of digital data preservation are being shaken to the core.Since the start of the second Trump administration, we have seen a progressive removal of climate, environmental, and socioeconomic data from federal websites, with further threats to dismantle data infrastructure looming. 1 This essay represents a short personal account of the data rescue efforts of the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), which was run by Columbia University's Integrated Earth System Information (CIESIN) since the late 1990s, and for which I served as deputy manager and then manager for nearly 20 years.I share this account to offer lessons for other data repositories and to underscore the importance of solidarity in the data community in the face of shrinking resources and foundering political support.SEDAC was established in the 1990s, as part of NASA's Mission to Planet Earth, to serve as a bridge between the Earth and social science research communities.It provided data complementary to NASA's satellite remote sensing assets-such as gridded data representing population distribution, economic activity, poverty and social vulnerability, as well as infrastructure and sustainability data sets-all with the goal of serving the human dimensions of global change research community.SEDAC's flagship data product, the Gridded Population of the World (GPW), was the first raster representation of global population, setting the stage for increasingly sophisticated modeled population distributions such as Landscan, WorldPop, and GHS-POP.The American Geophysical Union (AGU) recently recognized GPW as an 'impactful dataset,' defined as one that supports the broad spectrum of research, analysis, and decision-making.SEDAC data were also widely used by practitioners such as urban planners and humanitarian and development organizations, and were frequently used in policy-oriented reports.For SEDAC, the rumblings in Washington DC began just days after the inauguration in late January 2025, when we were notified by NASA that terms related to environmental justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion needed to be scrubbed from all its data center websites.These sad but required changes became more impactful for SEDAC when, on March 7th, SEDAC received a stop work order from NASA, part of a larger set of orders that were issued to all Columbia University principal investigators of federally funded projects.Although concerning, we hoped that this could be reversed through negotiations, and indeed eventually, most of the