Building a Regional Paleontology Geodatabase for National Parks

National parks have no common standard for recording information about their fossils. Each park works like an island, designing databases for its own needs — often as extensions of older ones — so parks collect different information, in different detail and sometimes in several formats as software changes. An update can make a database richer or strip useful data out. And a database that demands specialised training can suffer when the people entering data lack it: required fields may be filled wrongly, or open fields left underused because inexperienced staff struggle with complex procedures.

Why it matters

Fossil-bearing rocks, and the patterns they reveal, don't stop at park boundaries. Fossil localities tell us about ancient environments and ecology at both small and large scales, so park paleontology databases need to work together — collecting comparable data, in comparable formats and software. When software is retired, or the Park Service changes providers, parks switch as their time and resources allow, and two parks may collect identical information yet be unable to combine it. The Service's museum databases were themselves changing, with no guarantee that existing paleontology databases would work with the new servicewide system from August 2024. Some parks have not yet been able to start managing their fossils at all, and the same problem faces agencies across the Department of the Interior.

A regional solution

Many parks work with sister agencies and local paleontologists to survey their fossils, creating a wealth of information waiting to be organised for research, interpretation and management. The Park Service's Intermountain Regional Office, with the NPS Paleontology Program and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, began building a geospatial database and standards to provide a framework for bringing regional data together. Integrated, standardised data can support compliance for park projects through predictive modelling, reveal new patterns in where fossils occur, and make fossil protection a lasting part of management. Work began with Glen Canyon staff — going through their existing data and doing fieldwork with them and a team of outside paleontologists — to build a new authoritative dataset for park staff, researchers and, where appropriate, the public.

What's in it

The fields were set in consultation with Park Service GIS specialists, with rangers in mind, and with paleontology experts. Feedback from the Alaska, Intermountain and Pacific West regions — especially from Colorado National Monument, Grand Canyon National Park, Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, Yellowstone National Park and their partners — continues to shape the standards. The database has eight feature classes and three related tables for survey tracks, fossil localities, prospecting areas, collected specimens, where photos are stored, and monitoring.

Approximately 742 Glen Canyon localities were cleaned, checked and imported, with more than 1,000 photos and 45 monitoring records at nine sites. Many are new to the park, found in internal USGS files going back to 1928, among USGS packrat midden sites, or in surveys over the past year.

A web map of Glen Canyon with randomly generated fossil localities. Credit: National Park Service.

In the field

Fieldwork is a big part of the project, and the regional dataset grows as new localities are found. But not every park has good internet or cell coverage, and not all data collection software works offline. In initial testing in March 2023, Park Service staff and a volunteer paleontologist at Glen Canyon used Avenza, a user-friendly offline field data and GNSS app, to document fossil track sites. The trip found 72 localities, including bone fragments of Early Jurassic tritylodontid mammaliaforms. The volunteers' feedback relegated Avenza to a last resort, because it pairs poorly with the ESRI products that dominate Park Service GIS; ESRI's Field Maps and Survey123 can collect data offline.

How field data were entered with GNSS software and hardware during the pilot collection with Avenza. Credit: National Park Service.

Tools for each park

The regional dataset sits on the Park Service's Portal, a secure server for sensitive GIS data, with web applications and dashboards for preliminary statistics and analysis. The aim is for parks to control their own data and feed it into the regional dataset, so they can explore trends in their region and closer to home and give visitors better interpretation.

Parks differ in geology, fossils, threats and ecology — Glen Canyon worries about changing water levels, Colorado National Monument about rockfall — so the database has to be flexible. It is "open," with branch versioning, so a park can keep its current database if it does not want to move to the new schema, with all data held on the Park Service portal and access managed through curated groups. The team works closely with each park to design tailored web applications for its data management, analysis and visualisation needs, refining them through repeated feedback.

The web application for querying and analysing the regional geodatabase. Credit: National Park Service.

What's next

The geodatabase is expanding across the Intermountain Region, starting with parks that have extensive mapped fossil locality data — Arches, Bryce Canyon, Petrified Forest, Yellowstone and Zion National Parks and Colorado National Monument — with other parks in discussion. It is also adding the Bureau of Land Management's Potential Fossil Yield Classification and fossil information from state geological agencies such as the Utah Geological Survey. The team is still working on photo storage, data entry methods, access, and balancing the needs of parks and scientists.

The goal is a comprehensive dataset covering all 74 Intermountain Region parks with documented, confirmed fossil resources — making the information easier to reach, encouraging good data practice, and inviting everyone involved to share in caring for these resources, in their own park and across the region.

Sources

Based on "Developing a Regional Paleontology Geodatabase – 350 Million Years in the Making," by Amanda Charobee and Meghan Thompson, GIS specialists, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and the Intermountain Regional Geographic Resource Division, in Park Paleontology News 16(2), Fall 2024, published by the National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words.

• The article's field photographs, credited to Andrew Milner, are not reproduced.