An offshoot of our Neptune Database, the Triton Database, just got published today in Scientific Data. The database focussed on plantonic foraminifera, and is very complete (more than half a million occurrences just for Cenozoic forams!): it not only includes data from NSB but also from the most recent deep sea drilling sites, land sections, and piston cores. It also contains a bunch of new age models for deep sea drilling sites, which were made semi-automatically using GAMs (kudos to the lead author, Isabel Fenton, for that brilliant idea!). The taxonomy has also been updated as it is based on a soon-to-be-published review of Cenozoic planktonic foram taxonomy by some of our co-authors.

Figure from the MS showing the data density in Triton (a) vs the one in Neptune (b). Planktonic foram biogeography in the Plio-Pleistocene is impressively well-resolved in Triton for instance.

Uncharacteristically for a MS I coauthored, most of the work is in front of me as I will be making in the coming months a dedicated page on our website for people to query Triton. I will also start importing back its data into NSB, which will probably take a while as it means creating new structures to accomodate land sections and piston cores, in particular.

Currently the database is accessible on FigShare, and I invite you all to explore it! I will probably post a second blogpost soonish with some examples and whatnots.

Thanks again to Isabel and Adam for inviting us to collaborate with them on that paper!

Reference:

Fenton I., Woodhouse A., Aze T., Lazarus D., Renaudie J., Dunhill A., Young J., Saupe E. (2021). Triton, a new species-level database of Cenozoic planktonic foraminiferal occurrences. Scientific Data.