A blueprint to free Arctic research is trapped in data silos

By Mary McAuliffe November 20, 2025
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Lonnie Thompson, professor and research scientist at The Ohio State University, stands in a negative thirty degree freezer where ice core samples from a glaciers are kept in the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center in Columbus, Ohio on January 15, 2021. The Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center gathers and studies the history of the Earth’s climate as it’s recorded in ice cores from glaciers around the world. (Megan Jelinger / Reuters)

Decades of Arctic research have generated vast amounts of data. Yet as the region warms four times faster than the global average, driving rapid and disruptive change, the information that we need to understand and respond to these shifts remains scattered across disconnected systems.

A new report from the Arctic Research Foundation (ARF), the Canadian Polar Data Consortium (CPDC), and the Digital Governance Council provides a roadmap for addressing one of the most persistent barriers in Northern research: fragmented data infrastructure.

Today, critical information about Arctic ecosystems, climate, and community conditions resides in separate repositories that use different metadata formats, vocabularies, and technical standards. This fragmentation makes it difficult for scientists, policymakers, and communities in the region to access the knowledge required for informed decision-making.

“Canada’s ability to understand and respond to change in the North depends on how well we connect the dots across data, disciplines, and communities,” said Keith Jansa, CEO of the Digital Governance Council. With the impacts of climate warming already felt across northern systems and those who live there, the report says that improving the use, accessibility, and interoperability of Arctic data is critical.

To demonstrate how interoperability can work in practice, the report features a detailed case study on adapting ARF’s Arctic Research Database to integrate with CPDC’s broader ecosystem of interoperable databases. Through a structured process of metadata crosswalking—mapping ARF’s internal framework to shared vocabularies—ARF transformed its standalone database into the first external repository fully integrated with the Polar Data Search, a centralized gateway for Arctic research.

By establishing shared data standards and machine-readable metadata, the project aims to make data collected by different groups more findable, accessible, and reusable across disciplines.

The report stresses that strengthening cross-database accessibility supports Indigenous data sovereignty by creating data systems that are transparent, respectful, and designed to ethically incorporate Indigenous knowledge.

The project has also created opportunities for the next generation to gain hands-on experience tackling a real-world data challenge by involving students from Red River College Polytechnic.

“By enabling cross-disciplinary research and fostering collaboration, we’re enhancing the value of data collected across the North—while providing a practical guide and case study for other organizations seeking to unite previously siloed, diverse datasets in meaningful and consistent ways,” said Johnathan Niziol, an Instructor at RRC Polytech’s ACE Project Space.

Finally, the report documents common technical challenges—such as mismatched metadata fields, missing schemas, and limitations in client-side frameworks—and provides a blueprint for other organizations to take the same steps towards improving interconnectivity of their own Arctic data systems.

To learn more about how this project is making Arctic research more accessible (and therefore more usable), click here to read the full report.