CNH-S: Exploring the history of coupled climatic and human influences on ecosystem changes during the last one million years

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This interdisciplinary project will examine the ways in which climate and human activities influence natural ecosystems over the immense timespans reflected in the geological and archaeological records. Scientists increasingly recognize that the insights provided by such long-term records can play a valuable role in sustaining biodiversity in future, yet it is exceptionally difficult to tease apart human-driven versus natural ecosystem changes in the deep past. This project will develop a new approach that integrates computer modelling with collection and analysis of archaeological and geological data spanning the last one million years. Computer-generated models will test hypotheses about how various human activities and climatic processes influence environmental changes that can be detected in archaeological and geological data. This project will help with conservation and management decisions concerning people and the environment that can be applied anywhere in the world. This project will also develop high school curricular materials to explore how the natural world is shaped by climatic and human-driven processes.Geological and archaeological archives afford the opportunity to explore coupled human-natural systems over evolutionary timescales. The challenge is to disentangle natural and human systems, and their coupling, in the deep past. This project outlines an innovative approach for studying ancient human-environment interactions by integrating empirical geological and archaeological data with generative modeling. The latter provides a framework for understanding how processes that occur over ecological or ethnographic time-scales are reflected in time-averaged fossil archives. This approach, which can be applied virtually anywhere in the world, will be implemented in a study the Cape Floristic Region in southern Africa, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and biodiversity hotspot of global significance. Although this exceedingly diverse ecosystem is under increasing threat from modern development, the legacy of human impact stretches back hundreds of millennia. This project aims to resolve the extent to which climatic and anthropogenic impacts have shaped the evolutionary history of this unique ecosystem, including the degree to which ecological functions provided by people are important to maintaining biodiversity. This will be accomplished through a program that includes primary data collection in the field and laboratory, and the integration and modelling of existing datasets to connect archaeological, paleoclimatic, paleontological, paleoecological, and geological archives that span the last one million years.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.