OVERVIEW: In an era marked by changing climates, the past offers valuable information about how species and ecosystems have responded to environmental change, but global-scale analyses are challenged by high data variety and dispersal.  The Neotoma Paleoecology Database supports global-change research by providing an open, sustainable, community-curated repository for multiple kinds of fossil data. Neotoma achieves high data quality by working closely with expert contributors and stewards. Neotoma specializes in records spanning the last few centuries to million years ? a time that covers the spread of humans worldwide and multiple large and repeated climate changes. 

By consolidating many kinds of data into one centralized resource, Neotoma lowers costs and enhances sustainability while offering paleoecologists a high-quality data resource.  Many individual prior groups have agreed to join Neotoma as constituent databases; these include NANODe and NACODe (ostracodes); the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (diatoms); FAUNMAP, MIOMAP, and ANTIGUA (vertebrates); the African, European, Latin American, North American, and IndoPacific Pollen Databases; the International Testate Amoebae Database; and the North American Insect Database.  Geochemists are adding their data too, including stable isotopes and organic biomarkers. We are exploring adding sedimentary ancient DNA.

DATA VOLUME: During this period of support, Neotoma has become the standard repository for Quaternary fossil data in North America and, increasingly, globally.  Neotoma data volumes have grown rapidly, with the number of data points tripling, from 2.2 million to 7.6 million.  The number of datasets increased fivefold, from 7,600 to >40,000.

GOVERNANCE: Community data resources require well-developed governance structures.  During the project, Neotoma formally adopted bylaws, established the Neotoma Leadership Council as the governing body, developed an annual election mechanism, and established Data Use and Code of Conduct policies.   All Neotoma data are freely available to all under a Creative Commons license, with customizable citations for individual Constituent Databases.  Over 100 scientists are trained as Data Stewards, who can upload and curate data.  We have held four annual elections (2017-2020). Neotoma co-founded the Earth-Life Consortium, a non-profit association with the mission to support the free and open access of paleobiological data.

SOFTWARE AND SERVICES: We released a new generation of Neotoma?s application programmatic interfaces (APIs), which enable other developers and scientists to write their own software to access Neotoma data.  The Neotoma database was migrated to open-source software (Linux/Postgres), a major effort that improves sustainability and access.   Database snapshotting services were created so that Constituent Databases could periodically receive copies of their own data, thereby enhancing access and preservation redundancy.  Two new interactive mapping services, Range Mapper and Ice Age Mapper, were created by Wisconsin students, to show how species shifted ranges in response to the global temperature rises with the end of the last ice age. A new version of Stratigraphic Diagrammer supports the visual display of all Neotoma data types.  All Neotoma datasets are now assigned unique identifiers (DOIs) and individual websites, to facilitate discovery by search engines.  We have set up Google Analytics to better track usage.

EDUCATION, TRAINING, COMMUNICATIONS: This project has supported the training of at least 7 graduate and 18 undergraduate students at the intersection of the geosciences and data sciences, a top-priority area for workforce training. Neotoma data are of particular interest to early career scientists.  As one said,  "I?d like to give a shoutout to open-access databases. These databases are what we early career scientists need to get jobs."  We held 22 workshops over the project period, to train other scientists 1) how to access and use Neotoma data and 2) how to upload and curate data.  We built several online educational resources for undergraduate and graduate students.   These include 11 new modules housed at Carleton?s Science Education Resource Center to teach about climate change, paleoecology, and biogeography using Neotoma; model analytical workflows for obtaining and analyzing Neotoma data; and a 13-week graduate course in quantitative methods, in which all materials are publicly available on GitHub.

SUPPORTING SCIENCE:  Neotoma data are now the standard resource for large-scale investigations into recent past ecosystem dynamics. The open availability of Neotoma data is enabling new kinds of convergent research among paleoecologists, archaeologists, paleoclimatologists, and macroecologists. As of May, 2021, 807 papers had used or cited Neotoma data, and these papers had been cited a total of 28,779 times with a collective H-factor of 81. API services had a peak usage of 10,000 calls/day in late 2020. Highlights include two papers in Science (Nogues et al. 2021, Mottl, Flantua et al. 2021) that used Neotoma data to better constrain the timing of widespread human impacts on ecosystems.

This work has carried on despite the pandemic and unrelated but unexpected loss of Dr. Eric Grimm, lead PI for Minnesota, in Fall 2020.  Eric co-founded Neotoma and built much of the underlying infrastructure.  Eric is missed, but his work lives on. 

Last Modified: 08/11/2021
Modified by: John W Williams