Environmental sorting of vertebrate faunas: Is guild-level locomotor and dietary ecomorphology an indicator of paleoenvironment?

脊椎动物动物群的环境分类：公会级别的活动和食物生态形态是古环境的指示器吗？这个问题对保护生态学家、生物学家和古生物学家来说很重要，因为这些答案有助于理解什么原则会影响在一个群落中发现哪些物种，这些物种及其群落将如何应对气候和环境的变化，以及我们如何根据地质记录中的化石组合更好地确定过去的气候和环境。该项目将重点研究北美的气候和环境参数如何与两个主要生物类群--哺乳动物食肉动物和蛇--的陆地食肉动物的平均运动和饮食有关，这两种动物都有各自的生理和运动特长，但这两者在生态上都是同一群落中的高营养级食肉动物。该项目将研究物种的两种特性如何在群落中共存？运动和节食吗？与大陆范围内的气候和环境有关。我们预计，一个群落内的物种将各自针对自己的生态位而专门化，但同时我们预计，局部地区的大规模气候和环境将限制一个群落内可能存在的分化范围(例如，生活在北极冻土带群落中的所有物种都必须共享使其能够在该环境中生活的专门化)。我们的目标是确定气候和环境与运动和饮食专业化的地理分布相关的程度，以评估使用这些系统从化石群落推断过去当地陆地气候和环境的可能性。我们的方法是定量的和地理上的综合。从博物馆藏品中，我们将测量北美各地的食肉动物和蛇的四肢、身体和牙齿，目的是为这两个群体中的每个北美物种获取20个或更多个体的样本，并在选定的广泛分布物种的整个地理范围内获得10个或更多个体的样本。我们还将测量更新世食肉动物的四肢和牙列，以便将我们的结果应用于晚第四纪古环境重建。这些测量将使用地理信息系统(GIS)方法进行组合，以绘制整个北美的社区层面的运动和饮食模式，以研究它们如何与气候参数相关联，我们将根据这种关联重建更新世气候和环境，并根据其他证据线与气候模型进行对比测试。

Environmental sorting of vertebrate faunas: Is guild-level locomotor and dietary ecomorphology an indicator of paleoenvironment?P. David Polly How do communities and species respond to environmental change? This question is important to conservation ecologists, biologists and paleontologists because the answers help understand what principles influence which species are found together in a community, how those species and their community will respond to changing climates and environments, and how we can better determine past climates and environments from assemblages of fossils in the geological record. This project will focus on how climatic and environmental parameters in North America are associated with the average locomotion and diet in terrestrial carnivores from two major biological groups, the mammalian Carnivora and snakes, each of which have their individual physiological and locomotor specializations, but both of which function ecologically as high-trophic level carnivores in the same communities. The project will study how two properties of the species coexisting in communities ? locomotion and diet ? are associated with climate and environment on a continental scale. We expect that species within a community will each be specialized for their own niches, but at the same time we expect that the large-scale climate and environment in a local area will restrict the range of differentiation that is possible within a community (all species living in an arctic tundra community, for example, must share specializations that allow them to live in that environment). Our goal is to determine the extent to which climate and environment are associated with the geographic distribution of locomotor and dietary specializations to assess the possibility of inferring past local terrestrial climates and environment from fossil communities using these systems.Our approach is quantitative and geographically comprehensive. From museum collections, we will take measurements of limbs, bodies, and dentitions of carnivorans and snakes from across North America, with the goal of obtaining a sample of 20 or more individuals for every North American species in these two groups and of obtaining samples of 10 or more across the entire geographic range of selected widespread species. We will also measure limbs and dentitions from Pleistocene carnivorans in order to apply our results to late Quaternary paleoenvironment reconstruction. These measurements will be assembled using Geographic Information System (GIS) methods to map the community-level patterns in locomotion and diet across the whole of North America to study how they are associated with climatic parameters and we will reconstruct Pleistocene climate and environment from this association and test that reconstruction against climate models based on other lines of evidence.