University of Toronto researchers are bracing for a clampdown on the U.S. government’s publicly accessible climate change data amid new restrictions by President Donald Trump upon government scientists.

The Trump administration has announced a mandate that requires all Environmental Protection Agency studies or data to undergo review by his political appointees prior to public release.

This policy includes any content on the EPA’s website, such as evidence of human-caused climate change.

It also ordered a media blackout this week at the federal agency.

“It’s only been a couple of days, but we’re expecting for radical change to happen in terms of data availability online,” said Michelle Murphy, director of U of T’s Technoscience Research Unit.

“We’re already seeing muzzling of scientists. We’re seeing the signals that they basically want to get rid of the research mission of the EPA.”

Murphy was one of the organizers of a project last month to identify and archive EPA programs and datasets available online that could be at risk of removal under the Trump administration.

The university hosted a “guerilla archiving” event to support the End of Term 2016 project by the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library which also hosts the popular “Wayback Machine” of old web pages.

Since 2008, the Internet Archive has captured and saved U.S. government websites at the end of presidential administrations.

“We picked the EPA, because there were so many signals from the transition team that that was a priority for cutting,” she said. “The result of it is that the EPA is the one agency where we have the best archived situation for the websites.”

As Trump was sworn in last week, his new administration gave the WhiteHouse.gov website a customary makeover. Among the key changes from its setup under Barack Obama’s administration was the disappearance of pages detailing the former president’s policy priorities.

Information on issues such as climate change was removed.

Although former WhiteHouse.gov web pages are still accessible on an archived version of the website, the same is not true of all government websites.

“That stuff is very vulnerable to loss,” said Murphy. “We’ve seen changes to the State department’s website. It’s getting rid of climate links and climate programs.”

She said her team is developing a protocol to track changes related to climate programs on government websites where important information could be lost.

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“It’s very disturbing and disheartening,” said Murphy.

“We’re glad that we did that work, but recognizing, too, that preserving the data that has been created doesn’t save the research that needs to keep happening.”

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