The EarthLife Consortium API: an extensible, open-source service foraccessing fossil data and taxonomies from multiple communitypaleodata resources

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.
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