Collaborative Research: GeoChronR - open-source tools for the analysis, visualization and integration of time-uncertain geoscientific data

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This collaborative grant from the Division of Earth Sciences Geoinformatics program will support the development of software tools which will enable Earth scientists to better quantify and analyze how uncertainties in ages influence records of past climate, ecosystems and landscapes. These tools will allow scientists to better integrate these records, and to integrate larger datasets into predictive models. Thus, the tools will facilitate a more thorough understanding of past climate changes, and more rigorous tests of hypotheses regarding Earth?s history. Two workshops will be held to ensure that the community of scientists who may benefit from these tools are provided with training and opportunities to provide feedback to the software development process. Specifically, the researchers will develop a package of integrated software tools and make these tools broadly available using the open-source and community supported platform ?R?. The tools will enable paleogeoscientists to use state-of-the-art Bayesian and Monte-Carlo-based approaches to quantifying age uncertainties in paleorecords, and allow more rigorous integration of data sets and models with more thorough accounting for age uncertainties. The tools will allow the broad community of paleogeoscience researchers to visualize and archive their data in intuitive and consistent ways. The researchers will apply the tools to a proof-of-concept data recovery effort aimed at archiving primary geochronological information for marine and terrestrial records of Holocene paleoclimate, thereby providing a synthesis and more permanently archive of results from the NSF Earth System History (ESH) Holocene initiative.