The Neotoma Paleoecology Database and EarthLife Consortium: Building Community Data Resources to Mobilize Dark, Long-Tail Records of Past Biodiversity Dynamics

Studying past global-scale biodiversity dynamics requires the assembly and analysis of thousands of individual site-level records, differing in type, scale, and complexity, and each representing years of effort and gathered knowledge. These are classic dark, long-tail data, gathered by highly distributed networks of scientists. An emergent solution is community-curated data resources (CCDRs), defined as sociotechnological institutions that coalesce around scientific communities of practice, with a common IT platform and systems for scientists to upload, correct, and use data. CCDRs vary in governance model and data system, but ideally should achieve: 1) FAIR principles that data be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, 2) transparent governance, with clear roles, rewards, and pathways for joining, 3) support data citation and annotation, and 4) emphasize living data that closely support the rapid evolution of new scientific research questions and analytical methods. Multiple CCDRs have formed in the paleogeosciences and are interdigitating.

Neotoma now holds over 4 million observations of micro-and macro-fossil distributions from 31,000 datasets and 15,000 sites, and is open to new members, contributors, stewards, and constituent databases. Neotoma is governed by a Leadership Council and distributes governance via its Constituent Databases, organized by data type and region. Neotoma data are accessible via Neotoma Explorer, digital object identifiers (DOIs) and Google-Datasets-discoverable landing pages, and programmatic interfaces (APIs). Others linking to Neotoma include NOAA/NCEI-Paleoclimatology, Flyover Country, and the Global Pollen Project. Neotoma has partnered with the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) and others to 1) build APIs that can jointly query Neotoma and PBDB (http://earthlifeconsortium.org/) and 2) launch the Earth-Life Consortium (ELC), a non-profit dedicated to supporting open access to paleobiological and paleoenvironmental data.