Environmental data is now available to the public via an artificial intelligence-ready, open access database.
Federal regulators and lawmakers can now access National Environmental Protection Act data in a single database through PermitAI, developed by the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).
NEPA review data was previously stored in siloed federal computer systems, usually in document formats that cannot be easily processed by modern data-crunching methods, such as artificial intelligence.
The research team at PNNL solved the silo problem with clever use of an advanced, custom AI algorithm trained to automatically recognize and categorize data. Once processed, the machine-readable dataset, known as NEPA Text Corpus (NEPATEC), makes the labor-intensive searches much simpler.
The NEPATEC 2.0 database includes data from multiple federal agencies involved in making environmental permitting decisions. The data includes environmental impact statements, environmental assessments, categorical exclusions and other key NEPA planning documents that inform decision-makers.
Four federal agencies, including the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Agriculture, have granted PermitAI access to their data, encompassing around 120,000 documents from 60,000 projects authored by more than 60 different agencies.
Federal agency staff will now have access to key data across multiple agencies in minutes instead of months, speeding up their ability to make informed decisions, PNNL said.
NEPA reviews provide the public with an opportunity to better understand the environmental impacts of proposed projects in their communities.
NEPATEC 2.0 works by streamlining and standardizing data and categorizing it through “metadata” that provides key information such as the relationships between data points. This coded metadata makes information easier to understand and reuse.
As part of PNNL’s strategic public–private partnership model, the PermitAI team collaborated with Google to implement data enrichment and storage in the Google Cloud Platform, making data sharing easier.
The PermitAI team is also currently beta testing SearchNEPA, an interactive AI-driven toolkit with an interface designed for federal NEPA reviewers.
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