Fossils for Future and the billion-dollar case for palaeontology's digital infrastructure

Review of the support for community developed data resources Relevant for the publication Dowding et al Fossils for Future. This project aims to consider the longevity, community and financial support, use, and backend of palaeontological and Earth Science datasets. Data There are three datasets. IRAL.csv is a survey of data resources and infrastructure. interested in the diversity dynamics of the databases. Richnesscsv3.csv is the curated version. CuratorReview.xlsx is information volunteered by the authors, who are also database curators, about the back end, data volume, and running costs as of 2024. Finalcial valuations of three databases are in sheet 2. Paleo database publication products.xlsx is a survey of the use of 6 databases according to the published literature that cites them. Data Contact Please contact EM Dowding for data inquiries, conflicts, or concerns. EM Dowding: [e-mail] - Contact for inqueries regarding data located in IRAL/DATA. Getting Started There are 4 primary analsyses presented within Dowding et al (in prep): database origination rate, richness, extinction rate Each are treated with a rolling mean and to account for boundary conditions in the time series, with the start and end dates of the oldest and still running were extended eg if they were active in 2024-25 their ages were extended to 2027 and plotted for the relevant times. Concerning the analysis of longevity, exploratory and summary statistics were used to investigate the impact of more recently developed databases on trends. ###Contributing Dowding and K. Cryer were main contributors Notes Key functions are from DivDyn [https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/divDyn/index.html]