Julia Wilcots

and 2 more

Jocelyn Sessa

and 4 more

For over fifty years, cores recovered from ocean basins have generated extensive fossil, lithologic, and chemical archives that have revolutionized the fields of plate tectonics and oceanography, and significantly improved our understanding of climate change. Although scientific ocean drilling (SOD) data are openly available after each expedition, formats for these data are heterogeneous. Furthermore, lithological, chronological, and paleobiological data are typically separated into different repositories, limiting researchers’ abilities to discover and analyze integrated SOD data sets. Emphasis within Earth Sciences on adhering to FAIR Data Principles and the establishment of community-lead databases provide a pathway to unite SOD data and further harness the scientific potential of the investments made in offshore drilling. Here, we describe a workflow for compiling, cleaning, and standardizing key SOD records, and importing them into the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) and Macrostrat, systems with versatile, open data distribution mechanisms. These efforts are being carried out by the extending Ocean Drilling Pursuits (eODP) project. eODP has processed all of the lithological, chronological, and paleobiological data from one SOD repository, along with numerous other datasets that were never deposited in a database; these were manually transcribed from original reports. This compiled dataset contains over 78,000 lithological units from 1,048 drilling holes from 390 sites. Over 26,000 fossil-bearing samples, with 5,280 taxonomic entries from 13 biological groups, are placed within this lithologic spatiotemporal framework. Information is available via the PBDB and Macrostrat application programming interfaces, which render data retrievable by a variety of parameters, including age, taxon, site, and lithology.

Leah LeVay

and 3 more

Scientific ocean drilling through the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and its predecessors, has a far-reaching legacy. They have produced vast quantities of marine data, the results of which have revolutionized many geoscience subdisciplines. Meta-analytical studies from these efforts exist for micropaleontology, paleoclimate, and marine sedimentation, and several outstanding resources have curated and made available elements of offshore drilling data, but much of the data remain heterogeneous and dispersed. Each study, therefore, requires reassembling a synthesis of data from numerous sources; a slow, difficult process that limits reproducibility and slows the progress of hypothesis testing and generation. A computer programmatically-accessible repository of scientific ocean drilling data which spans the globe will allow for large-scale marine sedimentary geology and micropaleontologic studies and may help stimulate major advances in these fields. The eODP project, funded through the NSF’s EarthCube program, seeks to facilitate access to and visualization of these large microfossil and stratigraphic datasets. To achieve these goals, eODP will be linking and enhancing three existing database structures: Open Core Data (OCD), the Paleobiology Database (PBDB), and Macrostrat. Over the next three years, eODP will be accomplishing the following goals: (1) enable construction of sediment-grounded and flexible age models in an environment that encompasses the deep-sea and continental records; (2) expand existing lithology and age model construction approaches in this integrated offshore-onshore stratigraphically-focused environment; (3) adapt key microfossil data into the PBDB data model from OCD; (4) develop new API-driven web user interfaces for easily discovering and acquiring data; and (5) establish user working groups for community input and feedback. This project is targeting shipboard drilling-derived data, but the infrastructure will be put in place to allow the addition of other shore-based information. The success of eODP hinges upon interaction, feedback, and contribution of the scientific ocean drilling community, and we invite anyone interested in participating in this project to join the eODP team.