Beyond Preservation: Stewarding America’s Critical HIFLD Infrastructure Data
In late 2025, HIFLD Open (Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data), a national collection of datasets tracking the location, risk, and vulnerability of critical infrastructure across the United States, was discontinued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). For more than two decades, HIFLD Open provided a shared, authoritative reference layer for emergency managers, planners, researchers, journalists, and private-sector analysts. Its shutdown marked not just the loss of a public portal, but the erosion of a common operational picture that many had come to rely on.
In the immediate aftermath, the geospatial and data communities responded quickly. Grassroots efforts like the Data Rescue Project took the initiative to download, mirror, and archive the datasets before they disappeared entirely. They ensured that HIFLD Open data was not lost outright, and demonstrated the depth of reliance on this resource.
But moving forward, preservation alone is not enough.
Preservation Is the First Step. The Goal is Stewardship.
As Adam Simmons notes, HIFLD predates DHS. The dataset originally emerged from a team of public-private actors with a singular mission: a shared spatial lens that would become the foundation for emergency response.
Archiving data protects it from disappearing, but it does not keep it usable, interpretable, or trustworthy over time. Static snapshots cannot address the challenges that made HIFLD Open valuable in the first place: accessibility, shared context, and the ability to evolve alongside the systems it describes.
HIFLD’s value came from curation, standardization, and an understanding that different users were working from the same definitions and assumptions. When that context degrades, users have to go back to hunting for data across agencies, reconciling incompatible schemas, and guessing whether similar-looking datasets actually mean the same thing.
While government officials still have access to HIFLD Secure via DHS, left in the lurch are the consumers of HIFLD Open. Non-profits, researchers, and academics came to rely on HIFLD Open as a central repository of datasets with national coverage. When HIFLD Open was discontinued, this user group was abandoned.
Post preservation, the challenge becomes: How can we steward HIFLD Open data as a living public resource so that this shared context can be preserved – both for the original users of HIFLD as well as the non-governmental community that has emerged to depend on this data?
But what framework should govern updates? How can the larger community that depends on HIFLD be leveraged to produce a higher fidelity dataset? And which organization(s) should govern this effort?
Announcing HIFLD Next: A Data Stewardship Initiative
PEDP, in partnership with Fulton Ring, is launching a new initiative focused on the restoration and long-term stewardship of HIFLD Open.
PEDP has led numerous efforts to preserve federally discontinued datasets, ensuring that critical public data remains accessible even when official portals go dark. However, we believe the natural evolution of the data preservation movement is to go beyond storage and toward stewardship: making data visible, explorable, and open to continuous improvement.
At its core, this initiative is grounded in a simple principle: critical public infrastructure data should be developed for and governed by the community of users it serves.
From Static Archives to Living Data
HIFLD Open, while invaluable, was never “finished.” Infrastructure systems change. Risks evolve. Definitions shift. Keeping foundational data relevant requires ongoing care.
Our approach emphasizes:
Rapid restoration of access, even in imperfect forms
Supporting bulk and API-based downloads so the data can be easily accessed
Versioning and change tracking, so users can understand how data evolves over time
Ontology-aware stewardship, focused on reconciling shifting definitions rather than freezing them in place
Community feedback loops, where real-world use surfaces gaps and priorities
Interactive visualization tools that allow stakeholders to explore infrastructure systems without specialized GIS tooling
Rather than waiting for a perfect technical solution, this effort embraces incremental progress: make the data available, let people use it, and allow real needs and pain points to guide what comes next. This “just ship it” approach is what Bill Dollins, one of the contractors who worked on HIFLD in its earliest days, recommends.
Who This Is For
Though this work is intended to serve the broad community that HIFLD was designed to empower, it is also for the non-governmental user base that HIFLD Open served:
Researchers and universities
Journalists and civic technologists
Private-sector analysts and developers
Emergency managers and responders
State and local planners
National resilience does not live in one institution or one system. It is built across agencies, disciplines, and communities—and it depends on shared, trustworthy data.
An Invitation to Participate
This initiative is not a replacement for government systems, nor a one-time rescue effort. It is a grassroots stewardship project, and its success depends on participation.
Whether you rely on HIFLD Open data in your work, have insights into its limitations, or want to help shape how public infrastructure data is stewarded going forward, we invite you to engage, test, critique, and contribute.
If you would like to contribute to our data stewardship initiatives, please get involved or donate to our efforts. Alternatively, you can reach out to us at hello@publicenvirodata.org.
