Collaborative Research: Sustained Resources: Neotoma: Advancing Earth Science Contributions to Global Change Research via Growth of Well-Curated Open Paleodata

Project: Research project

Project Details

Description

In this era of global change, studying Earth’s past offers essential insights into how life adapts to changing climates and intensifying human activity. However, the fossil record is large and diverse, so global-scale research requires the careful assembly and standardization of many individual records, with well-developed metadata and well-designed software systems to make these data accessible to all. The Neotoma Paleoecology Database supports federal requirements for sharing publicly funded data and supports global-change researchers, educators, and the public by providing a high-quality, expert-curated open data resource for paleoecological and paleoenvironmental data. Launched in 2009 with NSF support, Neotoma has become one of the most widely used and trusted international data resources for fossil data, growing rapidly in the volume and variety of its data holdings, functionality of its software services, and the size and diversity of its user community. This award will allow Neotoma to continue to scale upwards by addressing several major bottlenecks to growth and specifically by enhancing systems to support higher rates of data additions to Neotoma, more streamlined data curation, and better support solutions for new communities seeking to use Neotoma data to study and understand biodiversity dynamics driven by environmental change.Specific activities include better support for rapid upload of hundreds to thousands of datasets from participating research teams through enhancements to the Data Bulk Uploader System (DataBUS), with newly added ORCID user authentication and support for the popular Linked Paleodata (LiPD) format. Embargo Manager will support early data contributions and better data management practice, in alignment with NSF Division of Earth Sciences (EAR) Data and Sample Policy. The Hierarchical Vocabulary and Taxonomy Manager (HVTM) will improve data quality and interoperability by enabling efficient viewing and curation of controlled vocabularies. Neotoma will freely upload supported data types, with priority for NSF-EAR PI data, and will help on-board major geoscience paleodata communities. Neotoma PIs will develop and provide multiple training support activities for scientists, with focused workshops for early career researchers (ECRs) and scientists from underserved regions, multi-lingual support for workshops and online resources, publicly posted training videos, and model workflows for data handling. Neotoma developers will reduce barriers to access and support artificial intelligence and machine-learning applications by deepening Neotoma’s metadata provisioning to Science-on-Schema and DataCite. Lastly, Neotoma stewards will create custom-tailored training and leadership opportunities for ECRs by designing workshops, videos, and code vignettes to address ECR-identified challenges.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
StatusActive
Effective start/end date8/1/247/31/27

Funding

  • National Science Foundation: $108,236.00

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