NEOTOMA

NEOTOMA: A Community Database for Ecological Responses to Climate Changes of the Recent Past

The global climate changes projected for the 21st-century are far larger and faster than anything observed in human history. Therefore, to understand the adaptability of species to climate changes at the scale projected, we must turn to the geological record.

The recent geological record is particularly useful because during this time

1. climate changes were large, rapid, and repeated, and 
2. both these climate changes and their ecological impacts are well documented by a rich variety of paleoecological and paleoclimatic datasets.

The key challenge is to unify these datasets and make them accessible to scientists and policymakers working to help species and communities adapt to climate change.

Neotoma, founded in 2007, is an ecological database that stores information about the abundance and distribution of species for the past 5 million years, and provides tools for their visualization and analysis. Neotoma encourages multidisciplinary research by providing a common cyberinfrastructure for a variety of discipline-specific paleoecological datasets, which have been developed over decades.

Neotoma is an international collaboration that includes domain scientists from a broad spectrum of specializations (e.g. terrestrial plants, wetland plants, diatoms, ostracodes, insects, testate amoebae) and experts in information technology (IT). Initial development of Neotoma was supported by a 2-year grant from NSF-Geoinformatics, a 5-year renewal proposal is under review, and a new NSF funded project has just begun to study community responses to the climate changes of the last 20,000 years.