NEXUS 4: On Data and Public Trust
Who Is All This Data For?
Welcome to the fourth issue of Nexus, WII’s newsletter gathering ideas, articles, and resources at the intersection of land, water, culture, and integrative research.
This issue grows out of our recent online conversation, Data Isn’t Enough: Community Knowledge, Visualization, and the Challenges of Science Communication, featuring Kimberly Fewless of NSF’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Matthew Ross of Colorado State University’s Geospatial Centroid.
Below, you’ll find the recording and full transcript from that conversation, along with additional articles and resources for those who want to go deeper into the themes it raised.
At the center of the conversation was a simple but urgent question: who is all this data for? We are living through a moment where data collection is omnipresent, but there is a growing gap between rigorous science and the communities it serves. This is a relational problem as much as it is a technical one. If data cannot be accessed, read, interpreted, or trusted by the people it concerns, how can they benefit from it? How can they help shape it? And if tools are developed without end users in mind, how useful can they really be?
There is a version of the data problem that can look like a plumbing problem: the pipes are clogged, the formats are incompatible, the portals are hard to navigate. Fix the infrastructure, the thinking goes, and the knowledge will flow. The research and reporting gathered in this issue of Nexus complicates this assumption, approaching the question “who is the data for” through the lenses of infrastructure, policy, and community.
Event Recap
Data Isn’t Enough
June 3, 2026: Kimberly Fewless and Matthew Ross, in conversation with WII’s Director of Research Dylan Gauthier
Last week we hosted a webinar, Data Isn’t Enough: Community Knowledge, Visualization, and the Challenges of Science Communication, the opening event in WII’s 2026 webinar series, Practicing Integration. The talk featured scientists Kim Fewless and Matt Ross who shared work at the intersection of climate data, water management, visualization, and stakeholder-driven science. Across projects in the upper Colorado River Basin and Colorado’s Front Range, both speakers emphasized that the barriers between data and action are not primarily technical, but a matter of trust, interpretation, narrative, and sustained collaboration.
We have posted video and a transcript of their conversation and hope you’ll check it out if you missed it, and share it with your networks.
I have built many data sets only to learn that if you just build something, only your friends will come. People in your network will use the things you build, but reaching people outside of your network takes far more effort.
Featured Article
Don’t Reinvent the (Water) Wheel: Partnerships that Advance Water Quality Data Accessibility
Anika Pyle, interviewing Matt Ross & Martin Doyle (2026)
Internet of Water Coalition
A product of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Water Quality Portal holds hundreds of millions of data points—the largest water quality repository in the United States. And yet, as Matt Ross and Martin Doyle describe in this conversation, it has long been essentially impenetrable outside the research community. When the Internet of Water Coalition and Duke University engaged Ross’s lab at CSU to build a new tool to access water quality data, Ross and Doyle decided it would be better to re-work an existing tool. The result—an expanded version of the EPA’s TADA (Tools for Automated Data Analysis) toolkit—streamlines spatial queries, reduces the burden of data harmonization, and makes regulatory water quality data usable by tribes, states, and water managers who couldn’t access it before. Their partnership is a model for what open-science collaboration and open-ness to not reinventing the wheel can make possible.
These tools help non-researchers actually use the data that already exists. By adding options to query with spatial objects or tribal area names and improving retrieval for queries with mass amounts of data, users will find the data they need and identify actual data gaps more readily.
In Practice
Quench & the Colorado Open Soil Moisture Monitoring Network
IN-RICHES / CSU Department of Computer Science
Quench, developed by IN-RICHES with CSU, brings Colorado soil moisture data into one open platform, helping farmers, fire managers, and drought forecasters track current conditions and compare regional trends. Since 2023, the network has grown by 50%, filling key gaps across rangelands, croplands, forests, and headwaters.
FloodNet NYC
New York University, City University of New York, and the NYC Department of Environmental Protection
After Hurricane Ida revealed gaps in street-level flood data, FloodNet deployed 250 real-time sensors across New York City to measure flood depth and share it publicly. Built around equity, accessibility, collaboration, and relevance, the model helps residents and agencies respond, and is now spreading to Camden, Providence, and San Juan.
Article
Access to Data: The ‘Under-the-Radar’ Environmental Justice Issue
Daniel Delgado and Frank D LoMonte
American Bar Association, Human Rights Magazine (2024)
Environmental justice advocacy runs on data. Without it, claims of disproportionate harm are readily dismissed as anecdotes. On the other hand, excellent data makes environmental justice claims undeniable, as the Tampa Bay Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “Poisoned” series on lead contamination demonstrated. In this article, the authors highlight a worrying trend that, just as the environmental justice movement has been gaining strength, the infrastructure supporting public access to government environmental data has been quietly weakening.
From the Institute
Building at the Speed of Trust
Dylan Gauthier, Director of Research and Publications
Integrative Futures (2026)
Our latest essay from the WII Substack, Integrative Futures, takes up the question at the heart of this NEXUS newsletter: what does it takes to build trust in the scientific processes and institutions that produce it?
In a moment when public trust in institutions has hit a low point, and when the dismantling of research infrastructure at USDA, NOAA, and elsewhere is moving faster than most people realize, what does it mean to do slow, relational work in urgent times?
Dig Deeper
Resilient and Sustainable Water Resources Management: The Role of Water-Use Data and Interagency Knowledge Exchange
Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 2025
Kimberly Fewless, Olga V. Wilhelmi & Mari Tye
A new paper from NSF NCAR researchers argues that sustainable water management depends not only on better data, but on the relationships and institutional conditions that allow agencies to share it. Discussed at WII’s recent webinar, the research highlights interagency trust, shared frameworks, and common language as essential to making science actionable at scale.
Deep Impact: Effects of Mountaintop Mining on Surface Topography, Bedrock Structure, and Downstream Waters
Environmental Science & Technology, 2016
Matthew R. V. Ross, Brian L. McGlynn & Emily S. Bernhardt
In a 2016 paper, Matt Ross addresses how data is only as useful as the questions and frameworks behind it. By showing how two-dimensional maps underestimate the damage of mountaintop removal mining, the paper reveals how easily measurement systems can miss what matters, including the hidden changes to water movement and downstream chemistry.
Further Reading
Convergence Research for Sustainable Regional Systems
Heejun Chang et al. — iScience, July 2025
Convergence Research and Actionable Science Through the Lens of Adaptive Management
Mariana Cains — Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management, May 2024
Data Sovereignty in Community-Based Environmental Monitoring: Toward Equitable Environmental Data Governance
Reyes-García et al. — BioScience, 2022