Paleogeoscientists use natural archives to understand how climate, ecosystems, and environments varied prior to human monitoring. Accurately determining the age of samples is critical to this work, allowing scientists to pinpoint phase relationships between Earth systems and their forcings. There is always uncertainty in timing of these records, which can impact the certainty of the results in a number of ways.

The GeoChronR project is all about developing a framework for quantifying and visualizing the impacts of those uncertainties, and creating an easy-to-use set of uncertainty quantification tools for paleogeoscientists.

The single largest barrier to the development of GeoChronR was the lack of an accepted data standard for the paleogeosciences, especially one that could readily include ensembles of geochronologic or paleoenvironmental data. To meet this need, as well as the broader need in the community for a robust and flexible data standard for the paleogeosciences, we developed the Linked PaleoData (LiPD) Framework, a data model and format that is flexible and extensible enough for broad use across the paleogeosciences.

Since we released the LiPD framework in 2016, we have seen broad adoption of the approach and format, having been used in several, large data synthesis efforts in the paleogeosciences, perhaps most notably, in phase 2 of the Past Global Changes temperature of the past 2,000 years project, which assembled nearly 700 records of past temperature change, all in the LiPD format.

The GeoChronR package - a set of software and visualization tools, written in the freely-available and open-source R language, relies on LiPD data for input, output and as a container for age model ensembles. Once the data are loaded in, users can easily create or input age models, perform common analyses, such as correlation, regression, ordination and spectral analysis on the ensembles, and then visualize the output. Examples and tutorials, such as this one for performing ensemble regression (figure 1), http://lipdverse.org/regression.htm, are fundamental documentation for new users seeking to understand the what is possible in GeoChronR. Over the course of the project, we hosted to training workshop for early career researchers at Northern Arizona University. At the workshop, we trained a diverse array of scientists how to use LiPD and GeoChronR. Many of the attendees have made GeoChronR an integral part of their workflow for their scientific projects, and the number of users continues to grow.

GeoChronR, and LiPD, are collaborative projects, that have continued to expand, both in scope and in the number contributors, over the course of the project. We hope that these both continue to expand in the future as we continue to work with the community to develop, expand and improve these utilities for paleogeoscience community.

Last Modified: 10/04/2018
Modified by: Nicholas P Mckay