Plant Macrofossil

Plant macrofossils are preserved remains large enough to be visible without a microscope. They include leaf, needle, cone, and stem debris and can be used to identify types of plants formerly growing in the area. Plant macrofossil data provide a valuable complement to pollen and faunal data that can be used to reconstruct the terrestrial environment.

Obtaining Data at the World Data Center

Search Datasets

• Interactive Map
  Select study locations by region, proximity to a point, or text-based attributes.
• Google Earth Map
  Locate and download plant macrofossil studies using a Google Earth map interface. Google Earth must be installed to use this search tool.
• Search All Paleoclimatology Data
  Access a free text search of our entire study archive.
• Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Catalog Service for the Web
  ​Harvest paleoclimate study metadata records using an OGC web service.

Browse Datasets

• List of Plant Macrofossil Datasets by Title and Investigator
• Plant Macrofossil Datasets from Our FTP Site

Contributing Data

Investigators who wish to contribute their data to our plant macrofossil archive can find information on contributing below. Data and study description information can be contributed by emailing your data to paleo@noaa.gov.

• General Information on Contributing Data

Other Data Archives

Additional sources outside of NCDC for data and information on plant macrofossils and climate science.

• Neotoma Paleoecology Database
  Database of paleoenvironmental information including data from the North American Plant Macrofossil Database.
• North American Packrat Midden Database
  Packrat midden data from the southwestern United States and Mexico.
• Missouri Botanical Garden Database
  A searchable database of plant taxonomic information.
• International Plant Names Index (IPNI)
  A database of the names and associated basic bibliographical details of all seed plants.