Towards FAIRer micropalaeontological data

Sedimentary microfossil assemblage data can provide a crucial baseline of biodiversity prior to human influence, reveal species turnover dynamics across time scales inaccessible using direct observations and are essential for quantitative palaeoclimatology. Many micropalaeontological studies rely on merging data from different sources. This merging requires that the data are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, i.e. comply with the FAIR data principles. As a community we are in the favourable position that data sharing through established repositories is common practice. However, challenges remain to make micropalaeontological data truly fair: data sets need additional information (metadata) in order to streamline reusability. 

In addition, the biggest challenge to reusability is the semantically complex nature of species assemblage data. This is because of the existence of different taxonomic schools and evolving taxonomic insights, which both render standardisation difficult. As a consequence reusing micropalaeontological data is cumbersome, even when they are findable, accessible and interoperable. Moreover, semantic complexity leads to confusion and archiving errors, further hampering data reusability. Thus, to make micropalaeontological data FAIRer, we, as a community, need data standards to increase the value of our data and to make our science reproducible.

Within the framework of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) we are developing tools and processing pipelines to harmonise taxonomic data. At the same time we are starting a community engagement process to collectively define micropalaeontological data requirements. To this end we invite you to take part in a survey.

As an illustration of why we need data standards, we here report on common problems associated with the standardisation of taxonomic data identified in a large number of micropalaeontological datasets publicly available at PANGAEA. Our assessment focussed on planktonic foraminifera because of the relatively simple taxonomy of this group. However, we explicitly invite feedback from all data generators and data users from the micropalaeontological community to discuss solutions that work for everyone and can be applied across different taxonomic groups and different research fields.