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Ancient environmental DNA (aeDNA) data are close to enabling insights into past global-scale biodiversity dynamics at unprecedented taxonomic extent and resolution. However, achieving this potential requires solutions that bridge bioinformatics and paleoecoinformatics. Essential needs include support for dynamic taxonomic inferences, dynamic age inferences, and precise stratigraphic depth. Moreover, aeDNA data are complex and heterogeneous, generated by dispersed researcher networks, with methods advancing rapidly. Hence, expert community governance and curation are essential to building high-value data resources. Immediate recommendations include uploading metabarcoding-based taxonomic inventories into paleoecoinformatic resources, building linkages among open bioinformatic and paleoecoinformatic data resources, harmonizing aeDNA processing workflows, and expanding community data governance. These advances will enable transformative insights into global-scale biodiversity dynamics during large environmental and anthropogenic changes.

Ancient environmental DNA (aeDNA) data are close to enabling insights into past global-scale biodiversity dynamics at unprecedented taxonomic extent and resolution. However, achieving this potential requires solutions that bridge bioinformatics and paleoecoinformatics. Essential needs include support for dynamic taxonomic inferences, dynamic age inferences, and precise stratigraphic depth. Moreover, aeDNA data are complex and heterogeneous, generated by dispersed researcher networks, with methods advancing rapidly. Hence, expert community governance and curation are essential to building high-value data resources. Immediate recommendations include uploading metabarcoding-based taxonomic inventories into paleoecoinformatic resources, building linkages among open bioinformatic and paleoecoinformatic data resources, harmonizing aeDNA processing workflows, and expanding community data governance. These advances will enable transformative insights into global-scale biodiversity dynamics during large environmental and anthropogenic changes.

Paleobiologists and paleoecologists interested in studying biodiversity dynamics over broadspatial and temporal scales have built multiple community-curated data resources, eachemphasizing a particular spatial domain, timescale, or taxonomic group(s). This multiplicity ofdata resources is understandable, given the enormous diversity of life across Earth's history,but creates a barrier to achieving a truly global understanding of the diversity and distributionof life across time. Here we present the Earth Life Consortium Application ProgrammingInterface (ELC API), a lightweight data service designed to search and retrieve fossil occurrenceand taxonomic information from across multiple paleobiological resources. Key endpointsinclude Occurrences (returns spatiotemporal locations of fossils for selected taxa), Locales(returns information about sites with fossil data), References (returns bibliographicinformation), and Taxonomy (returns names of subtaxa associated with selected taxa). Dataobjects are returned as JSON or CSV format. The ELC API supports tectonic-driven shifts ingeographic position back to 580 Ma using services from Macrostrat and GPlates. The ELC APIhas been implemented first for the Paleobiology Database and Neotoma PaleoecologyDatabase, with a test extension to the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database. The ELCAPI is designed to be readily extensible to other paleobiological data resources, with allendpoints fully documented and following open-source standards (e.g., Swagger, OGC). Thebroader goal is to help build an interlinked and federated ecosystem of paleobiological andpaleoenvironmental data resources, which together provide paleobiologists, macroecologists,biogeographers, and other interested scientists with full coverage of the diversity anddistribution of life across time., SEAD

The Neotoma Paleoecology Database is a community-curated data resource that supports interdisciplinary global change research by enabling broad-scale studies of taxon and community diversity, distributions, and dynamics during the large environmental changes of the past. By consolidating many kinds of data into a common repository, Neotoma lowers costs of paleodata management, makes paleoecological data openly available, and offers a high-quality, curated resource. Neotoma’s distributed scientific governance model is flexible and scalable, with many open pathways for participation by new members, data contributors, stewards, and research communities. The Neotoma data model supports, or can be extended to support, any kind of paleoecological or paleoenvironmental data from sedimentary archives. Data additions to Neotoma are growing and now include >3.8 million observations, >17,000 datasets, and >9200 sites. Dataset types currently include fossil pollen, vertebrates, diatoms, ostracodes, macroinvertebrates, plant macrofossils, insects, testate amoebae, geochronological data, and the recently added organic biomarkers, stable isotopes, and specimen-level data. Multiple avenues exist to obtain Neotoma data, including the Explorer map-based interface, an application programming interface, the neotoma R package, and digital object identifiers. As the volume and variety of scientific data grow, community-curated data resources such as Neotoma have become foundational infrastructure for big data science., SEAD, VISEAD