maintain a coordinated, enterprise-wide data management plan to ensure that it continues to meet its legal and mission requirements as well as user needs.

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Understanding and predicting environmental change are likely to remain critically important activities throughout the 21st century. Hence, it is critical to archive and provide access to the environmental data needed to describe, understand, and predict changes in the Earth System and the impacts of these changes on ecosystems, society, and other elements of the system. NOAA is clearly dedicated to providing excellent service for its many user communities, and the agency is to be commended for soliciting external advice to make sure it continues to provide effective stewardship of important national assets. We hope that NOAA and its partners find the guidance offered in this report useful as they continue to improve their data archiving, data stewardship, and data access capabilities.