The database presented here contains radiogenic neodymium and strontium isotope ratios measured on both terrestrial and marine sediments. It was compiled to help assessing sediment provenance and transport processes for various time intervals. This can be achieved by either mapping sediment isotopic signature and/or fingerprinting source areas using statistical tools (e.g. Blanchet, 2018b, 2018a).

The database has been built by incorporating data from the literature and various databases and data compilations, and harmonizing the metadata, especially units and geographical coordinates. The original data were processed in three steps. Firstly, a specific attention has been devoted to provide geographical coordinates to each sample in order to be able to map the data. When available, the original geographical coordinates from the reference (generally DMS coordinates, with different precision standard) were transferred into the decimal degrees system. When coordinates were not provided, an approximate location was derived from available information in the original publication. Secondly, all samples were assigned a set of standardized criteria that help splitting the dataset in specific categories. We defined categories associated with the sample location, the type of sample, the sedimentary fraction measured, or the deposition age (as given in the original publication).

This dataset consists of one spreadsheet: "Dataset_Nd_Sr_isotopes_V3.txt", which contains the assembled dataset of marine and terrestrial Nd and/or Sr concentration and isotopes, together with sorting criteria and geographical locations. A full reference list is provided in the file “References_Database_Nd_Sr_isotopes_V3.pdf”. R code for mapping the data and running statistical analyses is also available for this dataset (Blanchet, 2018b, 2018a).

Version history:

V1: The first version of the database was published in September 2018 and presented data for the African sector (632 data points).

V2: The second version was published in April 2019, in which the dataset has been extended to reach a global extent (1530 data points).

V3: The third version contains a total of 5322 data points and has a better spatial resolution. Additional information was added to the database, such as deposition age from the original publication, a simplified determination of age interval (see table 1) and uncertainty estimations for Nd and Sr isotope ratios.