Seems to me there are potentially opportunities for greater returns to data gathering work as quality data can inform many more papers in the future. How that will work still needs to be brokered…
An example is the National Science Foundation NEON project, which is a long-term ecological monitoring initiative with common field methodologies across 81 North American sites. https://www.neonscience.org/
You should be able to publish data as a paper and get academic credit for doing that. Then others can publish analyses of that data, crediting you.