Research Guides: ENVS 601: Topics in Environmental Geology: Data and Applied Resources

Head of Library Teaching

she/her/hers

Email Me

Contact:

Email: ebwhite@towson.edu

Phone: (410) 704-8026

Subjects: Biology, Chemistry, Environmental Science/Studies, Forensic Chemistry, Math Education, Mathematics, MB3, Research Impact, Research Metrics, Science Education

Applied Resources

Not all of the information that you need for this project will be found in the scholarly literature. Instead, you will have to investigate applied resources to find certain types of information. For example, if you need official environmental sampling data collected by a government agency, you will want to search for that agency's publications rather than scholarly literature.

Environmental Science Data Sources

Climate

NOAA Climate Data
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides access to current and historical climate data.
National Atmospheric Deposition Program National Trends Network (NTN)
The National Trends Network (NTN) provides data about precipitation chemistry from sites in the United States.

Water

USGS Water Data
The United States Geological Survey provides access to data on water flow, water levels, chemical and physical information, and water use.
National Water Quality Monitoring Council Water Quality Portal (WQP)
The Water Quality Portal (WQP) contains water quality data from designated state, federal, tribal, and local agency sites in the United States.
National Ground-Water Monitoring Network (NGWMN)
The National Ground-Water Monitoring Network (NGWMN) provides current and historical data about groundwater data from wells across the United States.

Energy

Department of Energy (DOE) Data Explorer
The DOI Data Explorer contains projects, collections, and datasets published by the US Department of Energy.
U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) provides access to data on energy consumption, efficiency, prices, and distribution.

Transportation

TRID
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.

General / Miscellaneous

Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) Data Portal
The EDI Data Portal contains ecological and environmental data from publicly funded research projects.
NOAA Comprehensive Large Array-Data Stewardship System (CLASS)
CLASS contains environmental monitoring data from a large number of satellite sources.
Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC)
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.
Marine Geoscience Data System (MGDS)
The MGDS contains sensor-based geoscience data.
World Bank Environmental Data
The World Bank provides data on emissions, endangered species, land use, and more.
EPA Data Catalogs
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).
PubChem
PubChem provides information on the biological activities of small molecules. It is a component of NIH's Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative.

Government Publications and Data

Maryland Open Data Portal
A collection of data sets collected by the state of Maryland. Browse the environment or transportation sections or use the main search bar to find the most relevant data for your research in this course.
Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL)
TRAIL is a free database containing government technical reports that have been digitized.
US Federal Highway Administration Environmental Publications
A list of recent environmental publications from the US Federal Highway Administration. It contains resources about community impact assessments, stormwater management, and more.
National Technical Reports Library (NTRL)
Search this database to find technical reports published by state and federal government agencies.
Bureau of Transportation Statistics
Search the Bureau of Transportation Statistics website to find government data about transportation.

Data Repositories

The repositories below are good places to look for raw sample data on health-related topics. Video demonstrations of several of them are embedded at the bottom of this page.

Dryad
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.
Mendeley Data
Mendeley Data provides access to over 26 million open access datasets. It searches several data repositories at once, including Dryad and ICPSR.
Harvard Dataverse
Harvard Dataverse contains datasets on a wide variety of topics, including biology and health sciences.
ICPSR
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.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA): Data and Dissemination
SAMHSA provides a national framework for quality improvement in behavioral health care will inform policy, measure program impact, and lead to improved quality of services and outcomes of individuals, families, and communities. Data helps SAMHSA and the nation assess the impact of the changes to US health care systems and identify and address behavioral health disparities.
Figshare
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.
Open Science Framework
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.
re3data.org
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.

Ask a Librarian

ENVS 601: Topics in Environmental Geology