Here’s where I keep a running list of good data resources.

Most of these data sources tend towards environmental or development economics, since that’s what I’m familiar with.

I’ll add to this page as new data are brought to my attention, but if you have suggestions please email me.

General Data-Finding

  • Our World in Data (OWID): OWID may well be your first stop for just about any topic.

    • They have a wealth of subjects and data sources. If you’re using data you first accessed through OWID, you’ll want to cite OWID as a source, but ultimately pull your data from the source that they pull from to make sure you’ve got the latest.

  • Try to find the most recent well-published paper in your area, and see what data sources they use. Recent papers will often link to a Zenodo repository with their data.

Country-Specific Data

Rich Countries

Developing Countries

Agriculture

Animals

Birds

  • eBird: Cornell and the Audobon Society’s registry of over 600 million birding observations since 2002. You need to request access (which can take around a week). Once you’ve done that, you can use auk, the R package for eBird analysis.

Fish and Other Aquatics

  • fishR: this website has tons of great resources and data

Atmospheric Data

Atmospheric data is often generated as rasters (think pixels on a map). It requires an additional level of cleaning to translate these rasters into vectors (polygons like countries or points like cities) that we can run analysis on.

ekonomR vignettes will contain examples of this workflow (in progress).

Geoengineering Simulations

Energy

  • The International Energy Agency (IEA): includes carbon capture projects, critical minerals, coal, electricity, greenhouse gas emissions, energy prices, and more. Requires you to log in to access the free datasets, and then there’s a tier behind a paywall. (Vignette: to add, using your own login to download a dataset behind a paywall in R)

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

  • The Global Carbon Budget provides estimates of territorial carbon emissions, emissions from consumption, and emissions transfers. You can access the cleaned data through my R package ekonomR, and several vignettes cover its exploration.
  • The IEA also has emissions estimates

Energy Prices and Production

United States

Canada

Household Panel Surveys

Panel surveys are great because they allow us to track changes over time. They’re difficult and costly to run, however, so there aren’t very many high-quality ones.

Opinion Surveys

Pollution

Air Pollution

AirNow.gov: the best first stop for air quality monitoring

PurpleAir: a map of low-cost air quality sensors that have a high correlation with industrial-quality sensors according to California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District. These sensors update every 2 minutes; but the downside is that the data would be a bugger to clean

To add: the latest stratospheric rasters estimates.

Water / Other Pollution

Trade

  • UN Comtrade: this is the authoritative source for trade data, but it’s a bit messy to work with.

    • If you’re working with R, the R package comtradr has plenty of vignettes to access the API and help you along.

Water

United States

  • USGS Water Data: includes water quality data, water flow, levels of water and more. Here is the documentation for downloading help.

Africa

Weather

United States