Description
The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, as amended (NEPA), is a major environmental law in the United States, requiring Federal agencies to consider and document potential environmental impacts before deciding on a proposed action. Modernization of NEPA and permitting processes faces significant challenges due to the lack of standardized formats and interoperable systems for organizing and sharing NEPA-related information across agencies. Much of the information gathered during NEPA reviews is written into documents such as categorical exclusions, environmental assessments, and environmental impact statements, then stored in independent agency repositories with varying formats, metadata standards, and access mechanisms. The application of metadata and data standards, such as those recommended by the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), provides a shared vocabulary and structure for key entities such as projects, processes, and documents, helping streamline information exchange and collaboration across systems.
In this work, we publicly release NEPATEC3.0, an expanded corpus of public Federal environmental review documents with associated metadata, full text, and image information. Developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), the National Environmental Policy Act Text Corpus (NEPATEC) is an AI-ready dataset and standardized metadata repository designed to compile, organize, and enrich environmental review documents. The NEPATEC dataset is the primary focus and contribution of the PermitAI Data Thrust. NEPATEC3.0 substantially increases the number of metadata attributes extracted or generated from source documents and expands the diversity of contributing agencies. The dataset includes 188,330 files from 81,347 projects, 42 metadata attributes, and text and image modalities. Documents were collected from EPA, DOE, USDA, BLM, BOEM, USACE, and DHS using public URL endpoints, agency-facilitated downloads, agency-provided data files, and the ERDC API.
- Curated by: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
- Funded by: Office of Policy, U.S. Department of Energy; and the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (Permitting Council)
- Language(s) (NLP): English
- License: CC0