Nature & Environment

Save The Environment Before Donald Trump Is Sworn In As The President Of USA

Tripti
First Posted: Dec 19, 2016 02:48 AM EST

The Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit digital library, along with few other environmentalists and computer science experts, has volunteered to archive the scientific data available in the website of Environment Protection Agency (EPA). A similar initiative has also been taken by a group of academicians in University of Toronto, where it is referred to as a "guerilla archiving event."

The reason behind this novel archiving initiative is that there are high chances that a huge amount of scientific data will be lost if the EPA is shut down by the incoming Trump administration. The U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's ideas and views about climate change and EPA are no secret to the world. It is speculated that after being sworn in, Donald Trump may gradually cut down funding or completely shut down these research institutes, which will lead to loss of enormous amounts of scientific data. The supposedly endangered data include valuable information from satellites, research articles and toxicity reports submitted by small organizations to the EPA, reported CTV News.

According to Global News, Patrick Keilty, Professor of Information at the University of Toronto, said that, "There are a massive number of documents. Today we only did a very small number." He further informed that, "Today we fed 3,142 URLs into the Internet Archive web crawler, and we identified 192 more programs would like to tackle for future archiving."

Keilty also said that their initiative has generated good response among the Americans and "There has been a flood of interest from groups in many other American cities," and "Every day there's more groups coming in to say 'What can we do to help.'"

The founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, emphasized the role of his organization in preserving data for future reference and said that, "It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change. For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible."

See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone

More on SCIENCEwr