When we say “eco-data,” we are talking about many types of data sets, that include but are not limited to:

• satellite monitoring data of various ecological systems on Earth, including of living beings and non-living things that ecosystems depend on;
• data that counts, watches, or records various species, ecosystems, and groups of living things;
• data that track systemic human impact upon the planet’s habitability, including and especially the impact upon ecological systems;
• data that track how humans are impacted by environmental factors, including forms of ecological well-being and/or environmental hazards.

A note on gaps, repair, and counterdata. Sometimes, while looking for a type of eco-data that we want to work with, we find data gaps in which some type of data simply hasn’t been gathered or at least gathered at the scale we want it. Or, we might find data that needs some form of repair, such as an adjustment of a label of some category. Or we might find instances in which counterdata needs to be offered, such data sets that are limited in scope in such  a way that people are mislead by the numbers (cf. Currie et al. 2016; cf. Benjamin 2019).

Mike Fortun has argued that data is always only ever metadata, or data about data (Fortun 2023). In some cases, work must be done to unite data with appropriate metadata, lest we find ourselves in a double-bind.

See also: Examples of Eco-data