Research Guides: Environmental Studies/Science: Data Websites

Environmental Data Websites

Agricultural Statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture
The USDA has the agricultural census online going back to 1840.
Alternative Fuels Data Center
A repository from the U.S. Dept. of Energy for alternative fuel performance data.
Climate Change Knowledge Portal from the World Bank
A central hub of information, data and reports about climate change around the world.
FAOSTAT
Provides a broad array of statistics on food and agriculture covering data from 210 countries.
Farmland Information Center
A clearinghouse for information about farmland protection and stewardship. Links to data, fact sheets, reports, laws and literature.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Reports
Produces reports and technical papers and makes some of them available online.
NASA's Global Change Master Directory
Provides access to data sets and links and descriptions to other data sets on the web. "The project mission is to assist researchers, policy makers, and the public in the discovery of and access to data, related services, and ancillary information ... relevant to global change and Earth science research." This is essentially a portal to data from a variety of scientific and research agencies.
National Centers for Environmental Information
NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is responsible for preserving, monitoring, assessing, and providing public access to the Nation's treasure of climate and historical weather data and information.
NOAA Global Climate Change Indicators
Presents the latest information from several independent measures of observed climate change.
NODC - National Oceanographic Data Center
Provides national and international marine environmental and ecosystem data.
Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center
From NASA, this site has data sets, interactive maps and a map gallery.
U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit
Data, including maps, and reports on climate change and the United States.
UN Environment Programme: World Conservation Monitoring Centre
The goal of this organization is "To be an internationally recognised Centre of Excellence for the synthesis, analysis and dissemination of global biodiversity knowledge, providing authoritative, strategic and timely information for conventions, countries, organizations and companies to use in the development and implementation of their policies and decisions."
USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service
U.S. agriculture statics: production, land use, geospatial. Data can be retrieved by state and county.

Our World in Data

Our World in Data aims to present "research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems." Topics include: CO2 emissions, economic inequality, human rights, poverty, energy, life expectancy, causes of death, population growth, food and agriculture, innovation and technological change, violence and war.

Each large topic has subtopics. Browse by topic or search by keyword. Data is from authoritative sources and is available in tables, charts, and maps.