Abstract
Abstract. Big data are significant for quantitative analysis and contribute to data-driven scientific research and discoveries. Here a brief introduction is given to the Geobiodiversity Database (GBDB), a comprehensive stratigraphic and palaeontological database, and its data. The GBDB includes abundant geological records from China and has supported a series of scientific studies on the Paleozoic palaeogeography and tectonic and biodiversity evolution of China. The data that the GBDB has including those that are newly collected are described in detail; the statistical results and structure of the data are given. A comparison between the GBDB; the largest palaeobiological database, the Paleobiology Database (PBDB); and the geological rock database Macrostrat is drawn. The GBDB and other databases are complementary in palaeontological and stratigraphic research. The GBDB will continually provide users access to detailed palaeontological and stratigraphic data based on publications. Non-structured data of palaeontology and stratigraphy will also be included in the GBDB, and they will be organically correlated with the existing data of the GBDB, making the GBDB more widely used for both researchers and anyone who is interested in fossils and strata. The GBDB fossil and stratum dataset (Xu, 2020) is freely downloadable from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4245604.
Highlights
Palaeontology and stratigraphy have become a quantitative discipline of geoscience, and there has been a subsequent rapid increase in the implementation of numerical methods in palaeontology and stratigraphy that started in the 1960s (Shaw, 1964; Schwarzacher, 1975; Kemple et al, 1989, 1995; Sepkoski, 1992, 2002; Alroy et al, 2001; Hammer and Harper, 2006; Rong et al, 2007)
We show the update and the improvement of a comprehensive database of stratigraphy and palaeontology biodiversity, the Geobiodiversity
The Geobiodiversity Database (GBDB) was designed as a stratigraphic and palaeontological database, and its input format was designed as geological-section-based, which means that data entry clerks or any scientific users must input the metadata for the GBDB according to the geological sections or assumed sections
Summary
Palaeontology and stratigraphy have become a quantitative discipline of geoscience, and there has been a subsequent rapid increase in the implementation of numerical methods in palaeontology and stratigraphy that started in the 1960s (Shaw, 1964; Schwarzacher, 1975; Kemple et al, 1989, 1995; Sepkoski, 1992, 2002; Alroy et al, 2001; Hammer and Harper, 2006; Rong et al, 2007). Quantitative analysis based on big data of fossil and stratum records has been more common recently, especially on the study of biodiversity evolution (Alroy, 1998, 2001; Alroy et al, 2008; Hautmann, 2016; Fan et al, 2020), graphic correlation of strata (Kemple et al, 1989; Fan et al, 2013b), palaeoecology (Muscente et al, 2018), mass extinction (Muscente et al, 2019), and palaeogeography (Ke et al, 2016; Hou et al, 2020). There are professional databases, such as the Paleobiology Database (PBDB), Macrostrat (https://macrostrat.org/, last access: 1 November 2020), and the Geobiodiversity Database (GBDB), storing and providing a big volume of fossil record data and making a number of quantitative studies possible. Well-structured stratigraphic and palaeontological databases and user-friendly, accessible data are significant for the quantitative development of the discipline and, push forward digital Earth science in the era of big data (Guo, 2017).
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