QUEST projects both used and produced an immense variety of global data sets that needed to be shared efficiently between the project teams. These global synthesis data sets are also a key part of QUEST's legacy, providing a powerful way of communicating the results of QUEST among and beyond the UK Earth System research community.

This dataset collection contains climatology, soil. population, ecosystem and land cover data.

To facilitate this data exchange, and to avoid replication of the often labour-intensive efforts to source and visualize data, QUEST set up the QUEST Earth System Data Initiative - QESDI - a mechanism for easy, centralized access with flexible statistical and visualization tools for consistent processing and presentation of global data sets.