T249 Cenozoic Evolution of Tropical Biota and Environments III: A Session Honoring the Contributions of Ann F. Budd

Tuesday, 3 November 2015
1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Room 310

TROPICAL AMERICA PALEOBIOLOGY DATABASE: INTEGRATING BIOTIC AND GEOCHEMICAL DATA TO EXPLORE DRIVERS OF EVOLUTION AND ECOLOGICAL CHANGE

Paper number: T249-2
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 1:45 PM – 2:00 PM

Authors

Abstract

For more than 30 years the Panama Paleontology Project (PPP) has made use of the fossil record of Tropical America to reveal patterns of environmental and biotic change over the last 12 million years. Most PPP studies have focused on a single taxonomic group or a distinct metric of environmental or ecological change. Here we present the Tropical America Paleobiology Database designed to assist in the synthetic analyses of all PPP data. The relational database will collate quantitative taxonomic, ecological and functional biotic data within stratigraphic and geochronological context for comparison with environmental data as derived from high-resolution geochemistry from marine ecosystems and their communities.

Users will have rapid access to a large range of standardized information, facilitating detailed analysis on fossil and recent organisms to explore and test patterns of biotic and environmental change in tropical marine ecosystems over geological time. The Database will allow downloads and direct analyses to be performed on its contents, interactive access for browsing the contents and formulating specific queries. We describe the benefits of a unified stratigraphic, biotic, geochemical and environmental dataset, and present a test case of how the database can explore drivers of biotic turnover and ecological change.