Retrospect and prospect of a section-based stratigraphic and palaeontological database – Geobiodiversity Database

Abstract. Big data are significant to the quantitative analysis and contribute to the data-driven scientific research and discoveries. Here the thorough introduction is given on the Geobiodiversity database (GBDB), a comprehensive stratigraphic and palaeontological database. The GBDB includes abundant geological records from China and contributes a serial of scientific studies on early Palaeozoic palaeogeography, tectonic and biodiversity evolution of China. Nevertheless, the existing problems of the GBDB limited the using of its data. The turnover and improvement of the GBDB were started in 2019. Besides the data collecting, processing and visualization as the GBDB did previously, the database and the website are optimized and re-designed, the new GBDB working team pays more attention to data analyzing with the professional artificial intelligence techniques. GBDB is complementary to other related databases and further collaborations are proposed to mutually benefit and push forward the quantitative research of palaeontology and stratigraphy in the era of big data. The persistent snapshot of the GBDB data can be found at: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3667645 (Xu, 2020).