CAREER: Do Species Track Climate? Paleoecology to Disentangle Niche Dynamics

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Climate is an important factor in determining why plants and animals live where they do. When climate shifts, we anticipate that plants and animals may be forced to track their preferred climates across the landscape. Identifying the extent to which plants and animals will respond to changing climate is one of the most pressing questions in ecology and conservation biology today. To meet this challenge, this project will examine past responses to environmental change on both the continental scale and at the site level. The core of the outreach activities will bring the fossil discovery experience to students and the public while demonstrating the effects of climate change on ecological systems. These opportunities will reach people from across the broader Atlanta community, in addition to East African undergraduate students who participate in workshops facilitated by the Conservation Paleobiology in Africa program. This research will estimate the ‘climate fidelity’ that individual mammal and plant biomes have exhibited since the last glaciation. It will calculate the extent to which observed changes in the climates that plants and animals occupy correspond with the climates of urban and agricultural regions, creating a ‘human tolerance index.’ Using these methods, it will demonstrate how much climate drives range determination across trophic levels by comparing the relative fidelity of plants versus animals. By examining ecosystem responses to a major drought at Natural Trap Cave, Wyoming, researchers can test hypotheses about long-term ecosystem responses to precipitation while validating predicted species-level climate responses. By understanding how species respond to changing climate, we can identify which species and strategies to prioritize in order to conserve biodiversity going forward.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.