Abstract
Community paleoecology is a powerful approach for analyzing ecological communities during long-term climate shifts like the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, but it depends on accurate estimates of species co-occurrences. The Neotoma Paleoecology Database is an open paleodata resource that stores assemblage-level taxonomic, spatial, and temporal information for Quaternary fossil localities. However, its age estimates for many vertebrate fossil localities are based on uncalibrated radiocarbon dates, hindering comparisons with other paleoenvironmental proxies. In order to provide consistent and updated age inferences suitable for broad-scale paleoecological studies, we have reassessed the radiocarbon chronologies for all 14C-dated North American small mammal collections in Neotoma. Here we present the resulting database update, including 2074 radiocarbon dates newly added to Neotoma and new calibrated radiocarbon chronologies for 1553 fossil collections. The new chronologies cover more sites and include more dates than the chronologies previously available in Neotoma. They also provide fossil assemblage age estimates in calendar years, facilitating integration with other data sources. We anticipate that these updates will be useful for various applications in community paleoecology.
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Data availability
The aggregated dataset in Neotoma, including both dates and chronologies along with all other data for the affected sites, is available for download from the Neotoma API at the endpoint api.neotomadb.org/v2.0/data/aggregatedatasets/1352. The newly added dates and chronologies are separately available as dates pub copy.xlsx53 and chronologies pub copy.xlsx54 in the Zenodo release of the Github repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17064489.
Code availability
The R and OxCal code used in this project is available in the Zenodo release of the Github repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17064489.
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J.L.B. and M.A.J. conceptualized the project; V.J.P.S. carried it out and wrote the manuscript, with substantial contributions by J.L.B. and edits by J.L.B., M.A.J. and A.M.B. AM facilitated access to data from CARD and provided information on data status. S.J.G. provided technical support and facilitated bulk upload of new dates and chronologies to Neotoma; and N.C. handled corrections, new sites, and all other changes to Neotoma data. All authors have reviewed, edited, and approved the manuscript. We thank the original data contributors and the Neotoma Paleoecology Database for providing access to the data. This work was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences (EAR) 2149416, NSF EAR 1948579, and NSF EAR 2410965 to J.L.B.; NSF EAR 2149419 to M.A.J.; and N.S.F. EAR 2410961 to S.J.G.
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Syverson, V.J.P., Goring, S.J., Cullen, N. et al. Updated chronologies for North American small mammal fossil localities in the Neotoma Paleoecology Database. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06491-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06491-7
