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Why does nobody talk about how hard it is to find raw data on local tree species decline?
I spent 4 hours last Tuesday digging through county ag extension websites for old growth oak numbers in my area and hit nothing but dead links. Has anyone actually gotten a straight answer from those biodiversity databases or am I missing something obvious?
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miasanchez2d ago
The state forestry department in Vermont had a dataset on hemlock decline that looked promising until I clicked the download button and got a 404 error. I spent three hours calling around and finally got a guy who said they "lost the file in a server migration" back in 2019. The USDA soil survey maps are great until you need actual species counts, and then it's all click-here-for-nothing PDFs. I feel your pain on those dead links.
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jessem592d ago
That 404 on a forestry dataset is brutal, but the "lost in server migration" excuse stings even more. I had a similar thing trying to pull soil pH data for a project on maple regeneration in New Hampshire. Found this old state report that had exactly what I needed in a table, but when I dug for the raw numbers, the linked spreadsheet just bounced to a generic homepage. Called around and got the same song and dance about an old server that got wiped. It's like these state agencies keep all this great data in a filing cabinet that doesn't exist anymore. At that point you're stuck doing field work anyway, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of having digital records.
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fisher.thomas2d ago
Lost the file in a server migration" should be illegal. That phrase made me see red when I read your post. I chased down an old growth oak dataset from a county in Pennsylvania and got the exact same line. Guy on the phone admitted they had paper copies in a filing cabinet somewhere but "no budget to digitize them again." So the data exists. It's just sitting in a box. Meanwhile they've got a website full of broken PDFs that make it look like they're on top of things. The whole system is a joke.
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