A Transdisciplinary initiative for Fossil Record bias Mitigation

The fossil record offers invaluable insights into the history of life on Earth, including species' responses to past climate changes, serving as a vital resource in addressing the contemporary biodiversity crisis.

However, the fossil record is subject to multiple environmental, geological, and anthropogenic biases, which, if unaccounted for, may lead to misleading interpretations.

Despite an increasing awareness of these biases among researchers, our ability to mitigate fossil record biases in analyses and account for the uncertainty produced remains limited.TransFoRM therefore seeks to develop a coherent framework to address inherent biases of the fossil record systematically.

Specifically, I will (i) identify general biases of the fossil record through a systematic literature review; (ii) identify instances where researchers overlook biases in the fossil record through a statistical assessment of surveys (a many-analysts approach), (iii) develop a structural causal model that incorporates the data-generating process of the fossil record, to account for known biases and confounders; and (iv) strengthen the connections between paleontological research and conservation practice by equipping researchers with the tools, awareness, and knowledge necessary to navigate and communicate the complexities of the fossil record effectively.The transdisciplinary nature of the project and planned dissemination activities will lead to knowledge that is highly transferable into various fields.

The outcomes will provide a comprehensive framework to alleviate biases in the fossil record, facilitating the propagation of fossil information to the contemporary ecological crises.

TransFoRM is particularly timely, as confounder- and bias-corrected frameworks exist, with clear guidelines for their application to observational data in ecology, but are not yet integrated in paleontological research, prompting recent calls for their adoption.