Environmental Science

Dryad provides access to the datasets associated with published research articles. You can search for the title of an article to see if their data is published in Dryad, or you can search for a specific topic or keyword to see which datasets are available in this area.

Figshare is a repository containing a wide variety of research outputs, including datasets. After you search, you can limit your results to just datasets by checking the box next to "datasets" in the Item Type section on the left side of the screen.

Mendeley Data provides access to over 26 million open access datasets. It searches several data repositories at once, including Dryad and ICPSR.

Harvard Dataverse contains datasets on a wide variety of topics, including biology and health sciences.

Open Science Framework (OSF) is a platform where research can choose to make specific aspects of the research, including datasets, available to the public. Not all OSF projects have datasets attached to them, so it may take some trial and error to find what you need. Search for your topic, click on a project, and then check the files section to see what datasets are available for download.

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) provides access to datasets on a wide range of topics. It is especially useful for topics in the social sciences. While most datasets in ICPSR are free and publicly available, some of them may require you to create an account in order to download them.

The Registry of Research Data Repositories contains a list of data repositories, rather than the datasets themselves. It is a great place to look if you are not sure where to search for the dataset you need.

The Maryland state government provides access to a variety of open data sets, organized by topic. Try browsing the Agriculture, Environment, and Health sections to find data relevant to biology.

Baltimore City provides access to a data sets on a variety of topics.

Data.gov provides access to all of the United States government's open datasets.

The Census Bureau website provides access to demographic information about the United States. Click on Advanced Search to limit your search to a specific region, topic, or year.

A multi-source data search tool by the EPA: Environmental geographical information on air, water, and land of the United States.

The National Trends Network (NTN) provides data about precipitation chemistry from sites in the United States.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides access to current and historical climate data.

The DOI Data Explorer contains projects, collections, and datasets published by the US Department of Energy.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) provides access to data on energy consumption, efficiency, prices, and distribution.

A transportation database that combines resources from the Transportation Research Information Services database (TRIS) and the OECD’s Joint Transport Research Centre’s International Transport Research Documentation database (ITRD). Note that Towson subscribes to some but not all of the publishers that appear in this database. You can request any articles that we do not have access to via interlibrary loan (ILL). Contact your subject librarian if you require assistance with this process.

The United States Geological Survey provides access to data on water flow, water levels, chemical and physical information, and water use.

The Water Quality Portal (WQP) contains water quality data from designated state, federal, tribal, and local agency sites in the United States.

The National Ground-Water Monitoring Network (NGWMN) provides current and historical data about groundwater data from wells across the United States.

The EDI Data Portal contains ecological and environmental data from publicly funded research projects.

The EPA provides access to four catalogs of environmental data: Environmental Dataset Gateway (EDG), Geosaptial Applications, Registry of EPA Applications, Models, and Data Warehouses (READ), and System of Registries (SoR).

The aim of this data portal, which was established in the framework of the BioFresh project, and further developed under the Freshwater Information Platform (FIP), is to enable freshwater biodiversity data publishing and to increase the visibility of such data. The data portal, together with other FIP publishing options, forms a unique freshwater biodiversity data hub.

The MGDS contains sensor-based geoscience data.

CLASS contains environmental monitoring data from a large number of satellite sources.

PubChem provides information on the biological activities of small molecules. It is a component of NIH's Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative.

The Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) is run by NASA and contains data relating to how humans interact with the environment. It contains data on agriculture, climate, conservation, infrastructure, land use, and more.
Note from NASA: SEDAC data and information are no longer being updated at this time. The information on Earthdata represents the best data and information available for SEDAC before March 7, 2025.

The World Bank provides data on emissions, endangered species, land use, and more.