THE EXTENDING OCEAN DRILLING PURSUITS (EODP) PROJECT: STRATIGRAPHIC THROUGH BIOTIC TRENDS

For more than 50 years, cores recovered from the oceans have generated fossil, lithologic, and chemical archives, revolutionizing plate tectonics, oceanography, our understanding of biogeochemical evolution and past climatic change. Despite that all scientific ocean drilling (SOD) data and results open access after each expedition, formats for these data are heterogeneous and it is typical for lithological, chronological, and paleobiological data to be separated into different repositories. This has limited researchers' abilities to effectively and efficiently discover and analyze integrated SOD data sets. The extending Ocean Drilling Pursuits (eODP) project has been working since 2019 on harmonizing and integrating these data into a single dataset. A key motivation for this work is that the stratigraphic, lithologic, and fossil occurrence and abundance data from planktic and benthic organisms within these cores offers unparalleled data with which to interrogate species-level paleoecological and evolutionary patterns and processes and their connections to the sedimentary record. Here, we describe the current status of taxonomic and stratigraphic data contained in the eODP dataset, as well as future plans for improving these data and new data acquisition streams. These plans include improving the stratigraphy and adding a state-of-the-art taxonomic understanding at the species level. The discussion of general trends found within this harmonized dataset include examining abundances for different microfossil groups, to the dominance of different sediment types through time.

There are two companion abstracts to this one: Sessa et al. covers the data management, corrections, and workflow used to collate these data, while Jamson et al. will showcase geographic analyses using these data.