Our researcher co-authors a publication in Nature Ecology & Evolution

04 03 2026

Dr hab. Kenneth De Baets, university professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, is a co-author of the scientific publication entitled “The billion-dollar case for sustaining palaeontology’s digital databases”, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The paper discusses the impact of open databases on palaeontology, which have enabled large-scale research on the history of life on Earth, but also shows how fragile and short-lived these resources can be.

Open databases in palaeontology are publicly available systems that enable the collection and management of information on the fossil record, including taxonomic, stratigraphic, and location data. These databases are the foundation for large-scale analyses of the history of life on Earth, making it possible to move from local compilations to global and large-scale analyses (for example, revealing macroevolutionary patterns of mass extinctions). The databases gather data created with a huge amount of work, and their maintenance is a condition for further development of research. A limitation is that some of the information they contain is “processed” data, meaning interpretations that more often change as science develops, and the durability and reproducibility of research requires strong links between databases and primary data as well as physical specimens, directly connected to the geological context.

The aim of the study was to map open, community-driven, and non-governmental databases in palaeontology, geology, and Earth sciences, and to quantitatively assess their dynamics, including how often such databases are created and discontinued, as well as to estimate the cost of data loss and present recommendations to increase the sustainability of these resources.

It was shown that about 85% of open databases operate for less than 15 years, and almost half of the identified resources become inactive within 5 years, while less than 15% survive a decade. The authors link this to typical 5-year grant funding cycles. At the same time, there has been an increase in the rate of database creation over the last three decades, but also clear peaks in database loss correlated with these cycles. In the economic section, the authors show that the conservative value of recreating data in large databases such as PBDB, GBDB, or Neotoma reaches at least USD 3.63 billion.

The paper shows that palaeontological databases behave like short-lived projects rather than long-lasting research resources, even though they are crucial for the development of modern quantitative palaeobiology. The main recommendation is to move away from short-term funding models, strengthen institutional support, develop interoperable and modular architectures, and strengthen links between digital records and physical specimens and metadata. The authors also propose a “third generation” direction for database systems, where instead of many scattered, weakly connected projects, a network of modules (for example taxonomy, stratigraphy, provenance) is maintained by the community and supported more stably at the infrastructure level.

The publication was headed by Elizabeth Dowding and is a major output of the large international IRAL (Integrated Record of Ancient Life) group led by Emma Dunne (Trinity College Dublin ) and Ádám Kocsis (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) in the framework of the PaleoSynthesis project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.”

We congratulate Dr Kenneth De Baets on co-authoring the article, which is available at the following link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-026-02985-8

Fot. (cover): Mirek Kazmierczak