Learning how aquatic environments respond to global change and human impacts is important in protecting, preserving or restoring those environments.  The recent fossil record from these settings offers significant evidence of past changes in hydrology and climate when compared with modern samples.  Large collections of field data from broad geographic regions is expensive work and time consuming, yet the collections over time may be set aside and the data may be lost.  These datasets are reusable and valuable in helping to answer questions that bear upon many issues tied to water usage, water quality, and global change.  The Neotoma Paleoecology Database is an open, ethically sustainable, high-quality and community curated repository for many kinds of paleoecological data, including that of aquatic environments.  In this portion of the Neotoma grant, the focus was on large datasets of aquatic organisms known as ostracodes (microscopic crustaceans).  Uploading these datasets preserves the hard-won data and makes it available to all who are interested. 

In this grant, we accomplished three main goals linked to data access, data growth and stewardship.  In the areas of data access and data growth, we successfully uploaded 4,156 sites to Neotoma, expanding the ostracode data in the Neotoma database to 4,702 sites with 5,230 datasets.  The largest of these completed database uploads was derived from the Delorme Ostracode Autecological Database with geographic coverage in Canada.  This database is curated by the Canadian Museum of Nature.  With this upload, which joins the North American Nonmarine Ostracode Database (U.S.A.) previously uploaded to Neotoma, a significant area of North America now has coverage, although future work remains to be done in specific areas.  Part of this work involved taxonomic harmonization, so that the currently accepted scientific names are used to identify different species.  In the area of stewardship, we began the work of preparing two large constituent databases from outside North America for upload to Neotoma, working with new data stewards .  These large constituent databases include the East Asian Non-Marine Ostracod Database (R.J. Smith, Lake Biwa Museum, Japan, Neotoma Steward) and the Non-Marine Ostracod Distribution in Europe database (D.J. Horne, Queen Mary University of London, UK).  These databases require new approaches in bulk uploading as well as taxonomic harmonization, and this work with these databases is ongoing, continuing through a related grant.   Currently approximately 50 sites from each of these two constituent databases are in Neotoma, with much more to come.  We now have the foundation of biogeographic coverage in the northern hemisphere for non-marine ostracods, which provide important environmental data for paleoclimate models and hydroclimate analyses in regional and hemispheric view.

In the area of student training and professional development, four undergraduate students and two graduate students gained research experience through this project, learning “R” programming and data analysis.  We were also able to offer an international professional development training workshop in the use of Neotoma for ostracode biogeographic data mapping, which was attended by 15 international scientists at an International Symposium on Ostracoda in Santa Barbara, CA in 2017.  This research also resulted to date in 3 published papers.  The uploaded data are available to all interested communities including educators interested in teaching biogeography, through Neotoma Explorer in the Neotoma database site at http://www.neotomadb.org .

Last Modified: 09/25/2024
Modified by: Alison J Smith