The RMBL Data Hub is live

Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory is a non-profit field station in Gothic, Colorado, at the head of the upper East River watershed — the site of some of the longest-running alpine-ecosystem studies in the world, spanning pollinators, wildflowers, snowpack, climate, and the watershed itself. Today we’re opening data.rmbl.org to everyone: a single place that gathers a century of that environmental knowledge, and the tools to work with it, in one home.

The Data Hub connects the pieces you need to go from what’s known? to what does the data say?:

Knowledge Commons — search 5,000+ publications, 1,200 datasets, and 1,400 community documents from the Gunnison Basin as a connected citation- and concept-graph. Search by keyword or concept, follow the links between species, sites, and researchers, or query the whole corpus through Claude and other AI assistants via MCP.
SDP Browser — pan and zoom across RMBL’s curated geospatial catalog (snow, climate, land cover, imagery), pull values from any pixel, and copy a reproducible R or Python recipe to continue in your own analysis.
rSDP and pySDP — read the same catalog straight from the cloud into terra/sf (R) or xarray/geopandas (Python), lazily by default and in parallel when you ask. Feature parity between the two means you can switch languages without learning a new vocabulary.
Compute Hub — a shared JupyterLab and RStudio environment in the cloud, running next to the data with the whole RMBL geospatial stack preinstalled and roughly 6 TB of imagery already mounted. Open a browser tab and start working — no installs, no downloads.

Go deeper

Alongside the launch we’ve published companion guides to three of the tools — what they do, how they’re built, and how to get the most out of them in your own work:

Every tool on the site is open. Source code lives under the rmbl-sdp GitHub organisation, data moves through public APIs and cloud-hosted object stores, and the methods behind the science are documented alongside the code. We welcome bug reports, feature requests, and stories from anyone who finds the tools useful in their own work. Reach Ian Breckheimer at ikb@rmbl.org or open an issue on any of the project repos.