Planktic foraminiferal species distributions in the modern ocean track environmental features like latitudinal temperature gradients. Species shift their distributions as the marine environment changes, providing an analog for past behavior. Stationarity of species’ ecological tolerances is a first-order assumption of all paleoenvironmental reconstructions based upon modern analog methods. We are testing the hypothesis that planktic foraminifer species temperature preferences did not change between the Late Pliocene and present by comparing relative abundance of selected species to independent Pliocene sea surface temperature estimates. In this data release we provide faunal census data from 72 Piacenzian age samples.