STRABOSPOT

Connecting Geology Across Scales.

Designed by and for the geoscience community, StraboSpot unifies multidisciplinary workflows into a shared system that makes geologic data consistent, discoverable, and reusable.

What is StraboSpot?

StraboSpot is an interconnected ecosystem of applications that enables geoscientists to collect, manage, integrate, and share field and laboratory data within a single FAIR-aligned system. Designed through community collaboration, it supports workflows in structural geology, petrology, sedimentology, and tephra volcanology, using controlled vocabularies to standardize and enhance data discoverability. Built around the concept of “spots” which are spatially defined observations. StraboSpot links data and images from regional to microscopic scales, allowing users to organize complex geological relationships within one cohesive platform.

Motivation

Structural Geology and Tectonics (SG&T) investigate the architecture and deformation of the Earth—faults, folds, fractures, fabrics, and microstructures—across vast spatial and temporal scales to reconstruct Earth’s history. Despite forming some of the most fundamental “ground truth” data in geoscience, SG&T data have historically existed only in abstracted form within publications, with no standardized digital system for collecting, archiving, searching, or sharing them. This lack of common formats and cyberinfrastructure has limited data discovery, reuse, and cross-disciplinary integration. In response, community discussions through the EarthCube End User Domain Workshop identified the creation of a dedicated, standardized digital data system as a top priority, leading to the NSF-funded development of the Strabo Data System to provide accessible, sharable, and reusable structural geology data.

Data Overview

Spots: The Foundation of Spatially Connected Geologic Data.

A Spot is the core data unit in the Strabo Data System. A spatially defined observation that captures where and over what scale a measurement applies. By linking Spots hierarchically across field, map, and laboratory scales, StraboSpot preserves the spatial relationships, scale, and purpose of geologic data, enabling meaningful integration of primary observations and derived interpretations.