PAVING THE FUTURE OF PALEOECOLOGY THROUGH OPEN, COMMUNITY-FOCUSED DATABASES

The Neotoma Paleoecology Database is a critical piece of research infrastructure within the paleosciences. Neotoma stores information on Late Neogene ecological communities and abiotic proxies in an open and accessible online resource, making data available through direct downloads, programmatic interfaces, web mapping tools and educational resources. The database reflects both the breadth of paleoecological investigation, and the rigour and enthusiasm with which Eric Grimm pursued the database’s development. The database design facilitates growth and expansion of the database itself, and presents a number of opportunities for scientific growth and development.

We will highlight recent activities that have allowed us to provide better specimen-level support for archaeological and vertebrate paleontology, and demonstrate critical needs in other domains, for example, taxonomic links between Neotoma and other databases such as the Integrated Taxonomic Information System. We will discuss the need to scale-up the database ecosystem as the community and science grow, by building connections to external resources, including paleoclimate data, genetic and phylogenetic resources and other external databases, and by better supporting and engaging with the different communities that interact with the database. Finally, we will highlight the ways in which Eric Grimm’s attention to detail and his mentoring produceda well designed data resource that supports continued contributions from researchers around the globe by highlighting use cases for the database from pollen, diatom and vertebrate fauna communities.