6 Minute Read
How can researchers make sense of the enormous and growing amount of data being collected across the Arctic? And how can that data be made easier to discover, explore, and use to address real-world challenges?
These questions were explored during the 2026 Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) Annual Community Meeting, held September 15–17 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The meeting brought together researchers, project partners, representatives of Arctic Indigenous community and organizations, decision-makers, educators, and others to share research outcomes, discuss community research priorities, and explore opportunities for collaboration.
Mural in Fairbanks, Alaska.
The Arctic Data Center was represented at the meeting by Jim Regetz, co-PI of the Arctic Data Center and Director of Research Software Engineering at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. Jim presented during Thursday’s Big Map Data: Enabling Science and Solutions session on how interactive web-based mapping can lower technical barriers to working with large Arctic geospatial datasets, followed by a group discussion about how AI can help supercharge these capabilities. His presentation highlighted examples of how tools and technology developed at the Arctic Data Center can help turn large and complex datasets into resources that researchers and communities can more easily discover and use.
Making Geospatial Data Accessible
Arctic research increasingly relies on large, complex geospatial datasets. While these datasets can provide valuable information about Arctic landscapes and ecosystems, working with them can require specialized software, technical expertise, and significant computing resources.
The Arctic Data Center’s customized data portals offer an alternative. Interactive maps allow users to visualize and explore large data layers at a range of spatial resolutions, directly in a web browser. By bringing these capabilities into an accessible web-based interface, the portals make it easier for users to interact with geospatial data without extensive technical experience or downloading the data itself.
Putting Data Portals to Work
During his presentation, Jim highlighted several examples of data portals that use these mapping capabilities, including the Permafrost Discovery Gateway, QGreenland portal, and the Defense Resiliency Platform Against Extreme Cold Weather portal.
Each portal brings together specialized datasets, views, and supporting information for a particular research group, organization, event, or discipline. Built-in interactive maps provide a way for users to explore those data spatially, helping turn large collections of geospatial information into something that can be investigated directly in the browser.
For the Arctic Data Center, this work is about more than simply displaying data on a map. Data portals are resources that can be used by researchers and other Arctic stakeholders with a wide range of technical backgrounds.
What Happens Behind the Map?
Jim Regetz, co-PI at the Arctic Data Center, with collaborators at the NNA Annual Meeting.
A user-friendly interactive map can make working with large datasets look simple, but there is significant infrastructure behind the scenes. The presentation highlighted some of the processing workflows necessary for transforming large geospatial data into products that can be displayed and explored in the Permafrost Discovery Gateway.
These technical systems are particularly important when working with Arctic datasets that span large geographic areas or contain information at very fine spatial resolutions. Building tools that can handle these datasets while remaining responsive and intuitive is an ongoing challenge for Arctic data infrastructure.
Building the Next Generation of Data Portals
The presentation also looked ahead at how the Arctic Data Center could make interactive mapping available to an even broader range of researchers. One goal is to make it possible for any user to turn a dataset into a map-viewable resource with a simple click, reducing the technical work currently required to make geospatial data interactive.
Future portal capabilities could also bring together new types of Arctic observations. For example, the Arctic Data Center is exploring ways to spatially overlay field and drone data on a globe, allowing users to view detailed observations in their broader geographic context. A web-based portal wizard would help researchers enable the globe and add and configure data layers without needing to build a custom portal themselves.
Another area of development is templates for storytelling applications that combine maps with geospatial data and other types of data. These templates could provide a starting point for researchers and projects that want to tell a data-driven story without developing an application from scratch. Together, these efforts point toward a future where interactive mapping is not limited to a handful of specialized portals, but becomes a more accessible way for researchers to explore, communicate, and share Arctic data.
Connecting Big Data to Arctic Science and Solutions
The Big Map Data: Enabling Science and Solutions session highlighted a challenge facing Arctic research more broadly: making increasingly large and complex datasets useful to a broad audience.
For the Arctic Data Center, interactive mapping and storytelling are ways to help bridge that gap. By bringing large geospatial datasets into accessible web-based tools, data portals can make it easier for researchers and other Arctic stakeholders to discover patterns, explore information, and connect data to the questions they are trying to answer.
The NNA meeting offered an opportunity to share these approaches with the broader Arctic research community and to continue the conversation about how data infrastructure can support both science and solutions in a rapidly changing Arctic.