Biodiversity and the Evolving Earth: New Data, New Methods, New Insights

在这个项目中，新的计算工具将被开发和应用，以了解是什么推动了地球上生命和景观的进化。我们将研究生物多样性是如何产生的，以及它如何与地形的演变。我们要解决的一个关键问题是：地形及其历史在多大程度上驱动陆地生物多样性？由于三个主要原因，了解地球上生命的历史和地形的演变最近变得更加容易处理。首先，由于生物学、古生物学和地球化学界的努力，我们现在可以获得关于地球上几乎所有生命和许多环境过程的千兆字节的信息。这些目录包含了100多年来科学研究所获得的记录。现在几乎所有的古生代都有生物群增殖和灭绝的详细记录。其次，几乎所有的地球现代地形和环境都以米级分辨率绘制。这些数据，再加上使用无人机技术绘制的更详细的地图，使我们能够重建从单个河床到大陆尺度的地球地形和气候。最后，在了解如何确定生物和景观演化的日期、解释生物和景观演化并对其进行数学建模方面（至少在大尺度上）的快速进展，与数据获取和汇编方面的这些进展相匹配。这些观测和理论上的进步改变了我们对进化的看法，以及在一系列尺度上对地质和生物过程的长寿和保存的看法。它影响了我们对生命和景观如何应对外部过程的理解，这是可靠地预测固体地球和生物圈对气候变化等外部压力的反应的重要一步。然而，我们目前缺乏一个框架，使我们能够了解如何在不同的空间和时间尺度运行的过程联合收割机产生地球的生命和地形的历史。该项目将通过新的观测来解决这一问题，并开发数学和计算工具，以了解物理、气候和地球化学过程如何联合收割机结合在一起，在地球上产生地形和生物进化。计算和数学技能。他们将能够将这些技能应用于地质学，生物多样性和生态学之间的界面上令人兴奋的问题。

In this project, new computational tools will be developed and applied to understand what drives evolution of life and landscapes on Earth. We will examine how biodiversity is generated and how it relates to the evolution of topography. A key question we will address is: To what extent does topography and its history drive terrestrial biodiversity?Understanding the history of life on Earth and evolution of its topography has recently become significantly more tractable for three principal reasons. First, thanks to the efforts of the biological, palaeontological, and geochemical communities we now have access to gigabytes of information about nearly all life and many environmental processes that have ever been recorded on Earth. These inventories contain records acquired in more than 100years of scientific research. Detailed records of the proliferation and extinction of biota now exist for almost all of the Phanerozoic Eon. Secondly, nearly all of Earth's modern topography and environments have been mapped with metre-scale resolution. These data, combined with even more detailed mapping using drone technology, allow us to reconstruct Earth's topography and climate from individual riverbeds to continental scales. Finally, rapidadvances in understanding how to date, interpret and mathematically model biotic and landscape evolution, at least at large scales, have matched these advances in data acquisition and compilation. These observational and theoretical advances have changed the way we think about evolution, as well as longevity and preservation of geological and biological processes at a range of scales. It impacts our understanding of how life and landscapes respond to external processes, which is an important step towards reliably predicting the response of the solid Earth and biosphere to external pressures, such as climate change. However, we currently lack a framework that allows us to understand howprocesses operating at different spatial and temporal scales combine to generate Earth's history of life and topography. This project will address that problem, via new observations, and developing mathematical and computational tools to understand how physical, climatic and geochemical processes combine to generate topographic and biotic evolution on Earth.The project will suit an Earth scientist, biologist, macroecologist, physicist or applied mathematician who wants to work on a multidisciplinary project that will enable them to develop data analysis, computational and mathematical skills. They will be able to apply those skills to exciting problems at the interface between geology, biodiversity and ecology.