SGER: Towards a Community-Wide Paleobiological Database Analysis Center

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9912384Charles Marshall Many of the next major advances in evolutionary paleobiology will be facilitated by the construction of a community-wide database that integrates global paleontologic data with other relevant data. In 1998 John Alroy and I were funded by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara to run a series of workshops to help launch such a database initiative. A working group of 27 people from 15 institutions and 2 countries has been established, as well as a database structure (see http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/public/pmpd/). We currently have some 4,300 collections, representing a total of nearly 68,000 genus occurrences, in the database. Graduate students have been responsible for entering 99% of these data. However, our stratigraphic and geographic coverage is uneven, and we need to fill in the gaps if we are to produce convincing results. NCEAS, despite its normal rules, has generously funded most of the data entry, but is now unable to continue to do so. Thus, to maintain the data flow into the database we are requesting funds to support six graduate students distributed over four institutions and two countries over the next 12 months to keep the database growing. SGER funding will allow us to almost double the size of the database, significantly helping us towards a broader-based long-term database initiative.