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

John Williams, Stephen Jackson， Eric Grimm和Russell Graham建议研究物种和群落对晚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，NEOTOMA是一个新的社区古生态数据库，它通过将大多数主要的晚新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，消除了跨学科合作的障碍。该研究将是北美第一个直接整合化石花粉、植物-大化石和动物记录的晚第四纪群落动态的综合分析。PIs建议通过获取100个关键脊椎动物化石位置的新的AMS放射性碳年代来提高NEOTOMA数据库的分辨率，为NEOTOMA添加最近的高质量记录，根据这些新数据修改NEOTOMA现有的年表，并绘制过去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FAUNMAP合成更精细地细分，并将允许研究物种对最后一次冰消期快速气候变化的反应。pi将通过比较植物和动物的非模拟群落的分布以及非模拟气候的分布来检验这些假设。他们将创建基于植物和基于动物的生物群系图，看看这些图是互补的还是矛盾的。pi将进一步进行广义不相似性建模，以揭示物种在空间和时间上沿环境梯度的更替模式。

Floral and Faunal Community Responses to Late-Quaternary Climate Change John Williams, Stephen Jackson, Eric Grimm and Russell Graham The PIs propose a study of the responses of species and communities to late- 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.