Geoinformatics: Leveraging the Paleobiology Database for Research, Education, Mentorship, and Interoperability

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The Paleobiology Database has been its field's main driver of macroevolutionaryresearch over the last decade. It has yielded major insights into local- to global-scale changes in biodiversity, the consequences of mass extinctions, the ecological impacts of environmental change, and the geological processes that structure the fossil record. This kind of research is the only concrete basis for predicting the long-term effects of current global change on nature. At the same time, the PaleoDB has served as an important teaching tool for university programs and a primary gateway into the literature for the paleobiological community. Over the past decade its 222 contributors have assembled 30,121references to publications, 808,807 taxonomic occurrence records, and 262,909 opinions on the classification of 120,842 taxa. Its website features an array of data entry, query,download, and analysis tools. It is integrated with GBIF and CHRONOS and offers several web services. It is governed by a 16-member Advisory Board that includes both contributors and representatives from allied organizations.The PaleoDB's activities have resulted in 101 official publications written by 51 different senior authors, and it is cited as a reference on more than 3000 Wikipedia pages. It was singled out as an essential resource in the report of the 2006 Future Research Directions in Paleontology workshop and has since received limited funding from three major paleontological societies for its educational activities. Mirroring on three websites and baseline administrative and technical support has continued through a volunteer effort, but substantive development of new infrastructure is needed. Goals of this project include enhancement of web services for use of large-scale portals such as the Encyclopedia of Life; exchange of data with cognate databases such as the Fossil Record File and TreeBASE; integration with PaleoPortal and individual museum collection databases; and creation of new tools and data tables involving phylogenetics, stratigraphy, geochronology, and geochemistry. These enhancements will, for example, make it possible for geologists to access dynamically integrated information on stratigraphic sections, or for biologists to quickly and reliably calibrate molecularclocks.