Macrostrat is free to use and open in every sense: open data, open source, open to contribution. That is possible because of a sequence of grants, sustained institutional support, in-kind contributions from partners, and gifts from people who use it.

Founding (2012–2016). Macrostrat began as the data infrastructure of a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER award to Shanan Peters (EAR-1150082). EarthCube funding (ICER-1440312) turned a research database into a public platform: the API, the first web interface, and the geologic map integration that became Rockd.

Sustaining (2019–). Continued NSF support for data acquisition and infrastructure (EAR-1948843, ICER-1928323) kept the maps and columns growing and the services running.

Macrostrat v2 (2023–). Three awards fund the current push toward a community-contribution platform. An NSF Elements award (2311091, with Stanford 2311092) links geochemical proxy records in the Sedimentary Geochemistry and Paleoenvironments Project to Macrostrat's stratigraphic framework. An NSF Open-Source Ecosystem award (RISE-2324579) builds the shared ecosystem between Macrostrat and StraboSpot. DARPA's CriticalMAAS program drove map ingestion at a scale that reshaped the maps system.

Throughout. The UW–Madison Department of Geoscience has supported the project continuously since 2013, including the people who build it. Rockd development is supported by the AAPG Foundation since 2025.

In kind. The UW–Madison Center for High Throughput Computing hosts our computing infrastructure. Mapbox has supported Rockd's intensive use of its location services since 2016. xDD provides links from geologic units to the published literature.

Grants start things and keep us innovating, but a free, open resource has ongoing costs that fall between grant cycles: certificates and domains, cloud hosting and backups, security and monitoring, testing devices, and above all the people who curate a very large dataset and build the software. Individual gifts let us keep the lights on between awards and prioritize the improvements our users ask for.

A one-time or recurring gift to the Paleontology Program Fund in Geology at the University of Wisconsin Foundation supports Macrostrat and Rockd directly.

Give through the UW Foundation

For larger gifts, sponsorships or in-kind partnerships, write to us.