INTERDISCIPLINARY FRAMEWORKS AND DATA DEFRAGMENTATION IN ANALYSES OF BIOTAS AND STRATIGRAPHIC BASINS

The multiple Tertiary depositional basins in central and eastern Oregon, collectively referred to here as the greater John Day region, are outstanding in terms of local preservation of long-term processes and events. These localities are characterized by chiefly volcaniclastic sequences spanning tens of millions of years that contain well preserved biotas found in association with isochronous index strata. The faunas and floras are not only of interest in terms of change through time, but contain diverse isochronous localities formed in laterally variable intrabasin depositional environments, allowing comparision of time-equivalent “paleobiomes”. New efforts by a large interdisciplinary group permit us to precisely correlate these units with classic deposits elsewhere.

Basins like those found in the John Day region are storehouses of stratigraphically ordered information, offering a variety of opportunities for accurate phylogenetic and ecologic studies. Many of the data sets needed for complete analyses of such areas are “fragmented”, however, as a result of a failure to integrate varied disciplines into a cohesive research framework, haphazard institutional data storage, or fixated interest in specific taxonomic or sedimentologic units. In many basins of comparable quality in North America, workers continue to approach different problems “piecemeal” with few efforts to synthesize complete tabulations of all data. As a result, there are misconstructions in the literature of the overall quality of the fossil record appearing in synthetic tabulations, or a failure to recognize correlative units proximal to basin margins. Defragmentation can be achieved for long term, interdisciplinary studies of these basins and their margins when the field collection events and data storage are performed with an overall goal of merging distinct metadata.