Micropaleontological data survey
Marine micropalaeontological data requirements.
Lukas Jonkers, along with colleagues at the MARUM Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen and PANGAEA are carrying out a pilot project funded by the German Science Foundation on handling data with complex semantic structure (NFDI4Earth). They invite interested participants to complete a survey designed to improve data standards in micropaleontological data.
> Go to the survey
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Introduction
The sedimentary record of marine microfossil species assemblages offers the unique opportunity to obtain a long-term view of changes in biodiversity and indirectly, of climate.
As a community we are in the fortunate position that large amounts of microfossil data are publicly available in data repositories. This renders data Findable and Accessible. However, the remaining two aspects of FAIR data, Interoperable and Reusable remain challenging because we lack community-defined (meta)data standards and requirements. This reduces the reproducibility of research, renders synthesis cumbersome and has led to many errors in archived data sets.
The goal of this survey is to assess what we as a community deem necessary to increase the interoperability and reusability of marine microfossil assemblage data. The product will be a checklist of (meta)data requirements that can be used by data generators when making their data (publicly) available. At the same time this checklist can be used by data repositories and data stewards to assess if datasets align to community standards.
The survey touches only slightly on the topic of the data format. At this stage, the focus is on what information is needed to ensure reusability of marine microfossil assemblage data.
In this survey you'll be guided through a series of data characteristics and asked if you think they are "desired", "recommended" or "essential". By default all information is desired. Essential implies that the data cannot be reused without this information. And recommended means that this information would be good to have and would increase the value and reusability of the data. When answering the questions, please keep in mind what information you would (like to) use when searching for certain datasets or when filtering a synthesis of microfossil assemblage data.
We plan to write a white paper to disseminate the results among the community. You will be asked if you want to participate in the writing process at the end of the survey.
Thank you for your time!
Note
Please assume that all information is available when filling out this survey: e.g. when asked "Are details about the chronology optional, desired or essential?", answer this question assuming that a chronology is available. Don't tick "optional" because this information is not always available.
About
This survey is part of an NFDI4Earth Pilot project funded by the German Science Foundation DFG on handling data with complex semantic structure. The project is carried out by Anne Strack, Lukas Jonkers and Michal Kucera at MARUM Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen and Robert Huber at PANGAEA - the data publisher for Earth and Environmental Science.
We are grateful to Paula Diz, Ivan Hernandez-Almeida, Oscar Romero, Tracy Aze, Deborah Khider, Adam Woodhouse and Karin Zonneveld for the feedback we received during design of this survey.
Please get in touch with Lukas Jonkers if you have questions about this survey or about the project.
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