A GIS DATABASE FOR FIELD OBSERVATIONS OF THE LOWER JURASSIC NUGGET SANDSTONE IN THE VICINITY OF DINOSAUR NATIONAL MONUMENT, UTAH AS DEMONSTRATED BY INTERDUNAL CARBONATES

The Lower Jurassic Nugget Sandstone consists of deposits of a vast, sand sea that once covered much of the western US. Dinosaur National Monument (DINO) in northeastern Utah, is located within the outcrop area of the Nugget Sandstone. Recent field work in the Nugget Sandstone, in and around DINO has led to the discovery of a productive dinosaur quarry as well as many localities of paleontological and sedimentological interest, and has yielded abundant field observations throughout the area. These data can be useful in interpreting the paleoenvironment and paleoecology of this area in the Early Jurassic.

To make such diverse data more accessible, to facilitate interdisciplinary studies, we have developed a GIS database to place them in a common geographic context. This GIS database will include localities of sedimentary features, vertebrate and invertebrate fossil specimens and tracks, and associated data collected in and around the park. It will provide a centralized resource for ongoing research on the Nugget in this area. Best practices of database architecture were applied in making a scalable solution that leaves the database open to the addition of new material in the future. The database structure was designed to maximize compatibility with existing National Park Service databases. This would allow data to be easily exported from both the park database and this field database to form a merged dataset that can be queried in ArcGIS.

An easily delineated area of interest is the occurrence of interdunal carbonates in at least 3 geographically separated locations in the vicinity of DINO. Over several field seasons, we have collected data in the form of field notes, photographs and samples, all associated with GPS location information. Consolidation of these data, collected at different times and by different people can bring together diverse information about the carbonate. Through the use of the ArcGIS software suite and the database created we hope to permit visualization of this data within its geographical context and facilitate analysis of the data to discover correlations and associations that will be useful in interpreting the stratigraphy and paleoecology of this formation.