The EarthLife Consortium API: an extensible, open-source service for accessing fossil data and taxonomies from multiple community paleodata resources

Paleobiologists and paleoecologists interested in studying biodiversity dynamics over broad spatial temporal scales have built multiple community-curated data resources, each emphasizing a particular domain, timescale, or taxonomic group(s). This multiplicity of resources is understandable, given the enormous diversity life across Earth's history, but creates barrier to achieving truly global understanding distribution time. Here we present Earth Life Consortium Application Programming Interface (ELC API), lightweight service designed search retrieve fossil occurrence information from paleobiological resources. Key endpoints include Occurrences (returns spatiotemporal locations fossils for selected taxa), Locales about sites with data), References bibliographic information), Taxonomy names subtaxa associated taxa). Data objects are returned as JSON CSV format. The ELC API supports tectonic-driven shifts geographic position back 580 Ma using services Macrostrat GPlates. has been implemented first Paleobiology Database Neotoma Paleoecology Database, test extension Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database. be readily extensible other all fully documented following open-source standards (e.g., Swagger, OGC). broader goal help build an interlinked federated ecosystem paleoenvironmental which together provide paleobiologists, macroecologists, biogeographers, scientists full coverage