DesignSafe Impact
DesignSafe serves experimental, field, and simulation data, it provides computational resources, and it facilitates discoveries that are driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) – all of which reduce the impacts of natural hazards on the built environment and communities. The following metrics illustrate the public value of DesignSafe data and the research it facilitates.
For specific examples demonstrating the value of DesignSafe, read our data reuse stories.
Community
 |
10,000+Registered Users |
High Performance Computing
 |
60 MillionCore Hours/Year |
Tools & Applications
 |
50,000Jobs/Year |
Growing a Collection of Datasets Over Time
DesignSafe has transformed the culture of data publishing in the natural hazards community, growing to house datasets from the NHERI network, as well as from research supported by other NSF Directorates, a multitude of Federal and State agencies, and international researchers. This expanding repository reflects the natural hazards community's increasing commitment to open science and collaborative research.
1,800+
Datasets
12,000+
Citations
2.4 PB
Data Stored
50+ Million
Files
 |
The DesignSafe Data Depot is a Trustworthy Data Repository of the CoreTrustSeal Standards and Certification Board. |
Fewer than 5% of data repositories worldwide have been certified by CoreTrustSeal.
Supporting a Variety of Natural Hazards Researchers
DesignSafe supports research across a wide variety of natural hazards, with earthquake and hurricane datasets being well-represented along with other water, wind, and wildfire hazards. The datasets available in DesignSafe represent the research of myriad authors, disciplines, institutions, and funding agencies.
2,000+
Dataset Authors
20+
Fields of Science
400+
Institutions
90
Experimental Facilities
1000+
Research Grants
25+
Federal and State Funding Agencies
Measuring Data Usage
We use the aggregated counts of Unique Requests and Unique Investigations for all published datasets to measure DesignSafe data usage These Make Data Count standards are considered the best metrics for assessing the number of people who have retrieved published data (Requests) or examined the information about datasets (Investigations).
Unique counts of Requests or Investigations tally distinct one-hour sessions during which a user interacts with a dataset. Accessing multiple files in a dataset within the same hour counts as a single session, which allows for a fair comparison between datasets with vastly different file counts.
850,000+
Unique Investigations
58,000+
Unique Requests
Measuring Citations
Another way to quantify the impact of DesignSafe on the natural hazards research community is by keeping track of citations that reference the platform and the datasets. Since its launch in 2015, about 1500 publications have mentioned DesignSafe or DesignSafe datasets, and these publications have been referenced more than 12,000 times. We observe rapid growth over time with annual citations increasing from about 1,000 in 2021 to more than 4,500 in 2024.
How Does Usage of Your Dataset Compare to Others?
Most natural hazards datasets receive between 5 and 44 Unique Requests within one year after publication, and over 25 datasets have more than 100 Unique Requests during the first year. These high performance datasets represent major natural hazard events and high impact research projects. Datasets with lower Unique Requests can improve their future usage through increased promotion efforts, including presenting at conferences, social media announcements, and formally citing the dataset in papers. To learn more about benchmarking data usage, see Esteva et al. (2025).
