RCN: Synthesizing Deep Time and Recent Community Ecology

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Understanding the structure, function, and dynamics of ecosystems is a central goal of ecological research. Paleo-biologists are engaged in parallel efforts to reconstruct past ecological communities using associations of fossil plants and animals. Modern ecology knows a lot about how the individual components of ecological systems operate in the present day, but considerably less about the linkages that hold together communities and ecosystems over long periods of time. Paleo-ecological studies in deep time (from thousands of years to several hundred million years ago) can reveal how communities shift over evolutionary time and how they respond to major environmental changes. This project will establish a Research Coordination Network to bring together ecologists and paleo-biologists in an effort to bridge the gap between ecology and paleoecology and apply modern ecological theory to gain in-depth understanding of land-based faunas and floras over the past 400 million years. The network resources and expertise will focus on the following central question: What are the patterns and causal processes of animal and plant community assembly and disassembly over geological time and up to the present-day? This project will generate new perspectives on change in the planet's ecosystems before human impact, allow us to compare what is happening now, and give us some ideas about what may happen in the future.This Research Coordination Network will produce a more comprehensive model for community assembly and disassembly that uses both neo- and paleo-ecological data and insights. This project will also produce a new synthetic book, Foundations of Paleoecology, which will integrate ecological theory with the paleo-biology record, and a public database of ecological communities of different land plants and animals over different scales of space and time. Additional broader impacts from this network include research experience and training of undergraduates and graduate students, and outreach to the general public through the new National Museum of Natural History, Deep Time exhibit and through games and teacher manuals to promote the teaching of linkages between ecology and paleoecology in public schools.