News & Events

Temporal Limit of Neotoma Expanded

Dear Colleagues,

The Neotoma Leadership Council on Monday 10/14/2024 unanimously approved the following motion:

Neotoma has no fixed temporal limit; decisions about whether to add new datasets to Neotoma are based on scientific rationale, compatibility to data model, and availability of resources by external communities and Neotoma itself.

Background and Rationale: Neotoma has experienced quite a bit of growth over the last few years (see Simon Goring's "State of the Database"). Over the last year, for example, data has come in from 66 different countries, representing 1,429 unique sites and 690,878 observations. And with growth, we have added complexity, for example through new data types such as ancient sedimentary DNA, speleothems, and Lead-210.

The membership-approved mission of Neotoma is simple - to provide a high-quality, community-curated, and sustainable public repository for the long-term storage of paleoecological data. While this makes no mention of specific data boundaries (perhaps other than those implied by "paleoecological” data), Neotoma has typically focused on terrestrial data from the Pliocene-Quaternary periods (with some Miocene and some marine data), reflecting the nature of the original groups that formed the database.

Neotoma is often approached by different individuals or communities to be used as a repository for their data. These proposals may extend the scope of Neotoma in different ways - for example to add many more proxy data from marine samples and/or data from much older time periods.

Based on these considerations, the Neotoma Executive Committee in late September sent out a survey to the Neotoma membership about if and where a temporal limit for Neotoma should be placed. We were impressed by the diversity of respondents and responses! Feedback was generally positive with respect to the idea of extending the temporal limit of Neotoma.

Many folks also included useful cautions about 1) not overextending Neotoma team capacity, 2) focusing on untangling some already-existing confusion in several of the variables (such as ecological group, depositional environment, etc.) before it gets worse with new data types, and 3) trying to keep the database from becoming too complex. There was a general sense during discussions that, because Neotoma’s data model is well-suited for continuous depth profiles (e.g. with cores), that its natural limit might be on the order of the Cenozoic, but hard limits are not useful.

Based on these responses and internal deliberations, the Neotoma Leadership Council on Oct. 14, 2024 unanimously approved the motion described above.

Also, multiple people emailed with suggestions for data they are ready to curate into Neotoma, from multiple different regions around the world. If your data are covered by existing constituent databases, please contact the lead stewards for those databases to discuss data upload (or the Neotoma Executive Team, neotoma-contact@googlegroups.com, if there is no lead steward listed). If your data would be curated into a new constituent database, please contact the Neotoma Executive Team to discuss the process further. Generally, the first step would be to fill out the information sheet for the proposed constituent database, and then email Don Charles, the lead of the Data Standards committee, for initial evaluation. All new constituent databases need to be evaluated and authorized by the Leadership Council, who must make sure that we don’t overstretch existing resources.

Again, thanks to all for thoughtful input, to Jessica Blois for leading the survey and summarizing its responses, and to the Neotoma Leadership Council for its careful deliberations.

Posted October 18, 2024 by Jack Williams