Collaborative Research: Leveraging the power of ecological modeling and functional ecology to understand spatio-temporal variation in community assembly through the late Quaternary

University Of California - Merced, Merced CA

Investigators

Abstract

Biodiversity—the variety of all forms of life—serves many functions to humans and its loss is one of the most pressing environmental issues of our time. Understanding the processes that shape species within ecological communities is crucial to chart the future of biodiversity and ecosystems in the face of human impacts. To date, studies of processes that are responsible for composition of ecological communities have been largely restricted to small (local) spatial scales and contemporary (months to decades) time scales. But these processes are complex and take place across many different scales, from local to continental spatial scales and monthly to 1000-year time scales. To understand which processes are important to structuring ecological communities at longer time scales, the project will use the fossil record of small mammals from the past 21,000 years. Results from and data generated by the project will be freely available for use by the broader scientific and educational communities. The project will provide workforce development opportunities and broaden participation in science by training middle- and high-schoolers and postdoctoral researchers from groups typically underrepresented in STEM. To elucidate spatial and temporal non-stationarity of processes structuring communities, the project will leverage the fossil record of small mammals across the late Quaternary, simulations and species distribution modeling (SDM) techniques, and trait datasets. The team will first conduct a comprehensive chronological re-assessment of the existing fossil record and carry out a suite of simulation exercises to understand the sensitivity of SDMs to spatial and temporal uncertainty inherent in the fossil record. The knowledge gained through these steps will then guide the construction of near continental, dynamic (i.e., changing through time) species distributions using the empirical fossil record. These modeled range-wide distributions for small mammals will then be stacked to obtain evaluations of community functional and trait composition, which will inform the spatio-temporal variation in community assembly processes. Ultimately, the findings will have implications for understanding the impacts of environmental and biotic change on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.