Hacking apart the disciplinary silo. Bridging ecology & the earth sciences with a bit of code and a lot of hard work

Hacking can help break down divisions among disciplines. Efforts supported by NSF's EarthCube Program make it possible to develop tools to bridge these divides. With a bit of hard work, an enthusiastic team, and some deep thinking about semantics, new tools are being developed to generate hypotheses, test old ones, and expand scientific outreach. Harmonized APIs for the Neotoma Paleobiological Database and the Paleobiology Database, and the leveraging of multiple open APIs within the FlyOver Country app, all bridge the Bio-Geo-Social divide to motivate data discovery, leading to new research questions across scales of space and time.