Collaborative Research: Floral and Faunal Community Responses to Late-Quaternary Climate Change

植物和动物群落对第四纪晚期气候变化的响应John Williams，Stephen Jackson，Eric Grimm和Russell GrahamPIS建议研究物种和群落对第四纪环境变化的响应，特别是物种更替、群落组装和分解以及非模拟群落形成的环境驱动因素。他们的研究将展示Neotoma的力量，这是一个新的社区古生态数据库，通过将大多数主要的晚近纪古生态数据库存储在一个数据库中，降低了信息学成本，并消除了跨学科合作的障碍。这项拟议的研究将是对北美晚第四纪群落动态的首次天气分析，直接整合了化石花粉、植物-大型化石和动物群记录。PIS建议提高新脊椎动物数据库的分辨率，办法是获得关键脊椎动物化石地点的100个新的AMS放射性碳测年，为新脊椎动物增加最近的高质量记录，根据这些新数据修订新托马体的现有年表，并绘制涵盖过去21,000年的15个时间窗口的所有数据。这些时间窗口比最初的FAUNAP合成更精细，将允许研究物种对最后一次冰川消融的快速气候变化的反应。PIS将通过比较花卉和动物群的非类比群落的分布以及非类比气候的分布来检验这些假设。他们将创建基于植物和动物的生物群地图，以查看这些地图是互补的还是相互矛盾的。PIS将进一步进行广义差异建模，以揭示物种在空间和时间上沿环境梯度的周转模式。

Floral and Faunal Community Responses to Late-Quaternary Climate ChangeJohn Williams, Stephen Jackson, Eric Grimm and Russell GrahamThe PIs propose a study of the responses of species and communities tolate- Quaternary environmental variations and, in particular, the environmental drivers of species turnover, community assembly and disassembly, and the formation of no-analog communities. Their research will demonstrate the power of NEOTOMA, a new community paleoecological database that reduces informatics costs and removes barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration by storing in a single database most of the major late-Neogene paleoecological databases. The proposed research will be the first-ever synoptic analyses of late-Quaternary community dynamics in North America that directly integrate fossil pollen, plant-macrofossil, and faunal records. The PIs propose improving the resolution of the NEOTOMA database by obtaining 100 new AMS radiocarbon dates for key vertebrate fossil localities, adding recent high-quality records to NEOTOMA, revising existing chronologies in NEOTOMA in light of this new data, and mapping all data for 15 time-windows covering the last 21,000 years. These time windows are more finely subdivided than the original FAUNMAP synthesis, and will permit study of species responses to the rapid climate changes of the last deglaciation. The PIs will test such hypotheses by comparing the distributions of the floral and faunal no-analog communities to each other and to the distributions of no-analog climates. They will create plant based and animal based biome maps to see whether such maps are complementary or in contradiction. The PIs will further conduct generalized dissimilarity modeling to reveal patterns of species turnover, along environmental gradients, in both space and time.