Speaker
Description
Created towards the end of the 1980s, pollen databases were the first data repositories that were publically available and served as a place for long term storage and as a research tool. From the beginning the European Pollen Database was an international effort including a larger group of people with some steering and guidance from North American palynologists. Eric Grimm was one of the architects of the structure of pollen databases that were created for North America and Europe with other continents and regions joining in later. The increasing number of regional databases lead to the development of a global pollen database, but the evolution did not stop there. Computers and the internet had developed rapidly providing new opportunities for the creation of tools and services to better display, search and analysis the data. The emergence of other palaeoecological databases sparked the idea to create a platform that could house different data types enabling multi-proxy data analysis and saving time and efforts in building tools for individual databases. This idea lead to the development of the Neotoma Paleoecology Database to supports research about ecological processes operating at time scales of 1 to 106 years, covering focused on the Quaternary to Miocene section of the geologic record. Neotoma’s name refers to the behaviour of packrats (genus Neotoma), which gather diverse biological materials into their nests, to be preserved for future generations. I will illustrate this history and provide an overview of what Neotoma has become, what is currently possible and which developments are envisioned.
