Toward Long-Term Data Stewardship: Merging The Speleothem Database SISAL into Neotoma, the Palaeoecological “Database of Databases”

Over the past few years, SISAL has released several versions of a global speleothem database as a community effort. The latest version, SISALv3, features 800+ records from both hemispheres, multiple proxies (stable isotopes (δ¹⁸O,δ¹³C) and trace elements (Mg/Ca, Sr/Ca, Ba/Ca, U/Ca, P/Ca and Sr isotopes)), and extensive metadata about cave sites and specimens. A major strength of the SISAL database is that it is a high-quality dataset with multiple manual and auto quality control checks performed by members and experts of the speleothem community, becoming de facto the gold standard for speleothem data. In the past few years, the database has been increasingly used in studies improving speleothem proxy understanding, as well as for global analysis of key past climate intervals and global climate patterns.

However, SISAL is organized only as a temporary working group within the Past Global Changes network (PAGES) and is scheduled to wind down after its current phase. This poses an essential question for this community-led effort: how can we place ourselves so that the carefully created database can be maintained and grow beyond the intended life cycle of the original working group?

To increase the visibility and ease of access to this data, accelerate database updates, and enable long-term data stewardship in a community of similar paleo datasets, SISAL has recently decided to join Neotoma as a constituent database, through a data migration that has been supported by the ETH Open Research Data program. Neotoma, a “database of databases” within the palaeoecological and paleoenvironmental sciences, provides a structure for on-going community data stewardship as well as a strong backend for SISAL data through standardisation of data entry, quality-check workflows. The SISAL team plans to maintain the popular SISAL web app for finding and downloading data, currently linked to SISALv3, and in the future plans to update the web app to dynamically link to SISAL-Neotoma holdings. This SISAL-Neotoma partnership also helps connect speleothem isotope data to data from other proxy communities, such as pollen or biomarkers, which can lead to further synergies to be exploited in the future.