The extending Ocean Drilling Pursuits (eODP) Project: Synthesizing Scientific Ocean Drilling Data

For more than half a century, cores recovered from ocean basins have generated extensive fossil, lithologic, and chemical archives that have revolutionized the fields of plate tectonics and oceanography, and significantly improved our understanding of climate change. Although scientific ocean drilling (SOD) data are openly available 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. Emphasis within Earth Sciences on adhering to FAIR Data Principles and the establishment of community-lead databases now provide a pathway to unite SOD data and further harness the scientific potential of the investments made in offshore drilling.

Here, we describe a workflow for compiling, cleaning, and standardizing key aspects of SOD records, and subsequently importing them into the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) and Macrostrat, systems with versatile, open data distribution mechanisms. These efforts are being carried out by the NSF-supported extending Ocean Drilling Pursuits (eODP) project, which aims to provide a synthesized dataset of SOD fossil assemblages, lithologies, and age models through time and space with as little revision and interpretation as possible. eODP has processed all of the data listed above from one SOD repository, along with numerous other datasets that were never deposited in a database system; these data were manually transcribed from original shipboard reports. The resulting compiled dataset contains over 78,000 lithological units from 1,048 drilling holes from 390 sites. Over 26,000 fossil-bearing samples, containing more than 5,280 taxonomic entries from 13 major biological groups, are placed within this lithologic spatiotemporal framework. All lithological units and fossil collections are associated with a chronostratigraphic age assignment as well as a continuous time age estimate based on position within cores. This information is openly available via the PBDB and Macrostrat application programming interfaces, which render the data retrievable by a variety of parameters, including age, taxon, site, and lithology.