The Environmental History of the Panama Land Bridge

由于其作为连接南北美洲的大陆桥的关键位置，巴拿马一直是气候学家、生物学家、人类学家、地理学家和其他试图重建和解释美洲植物、动物和人类分布和运动的科学家们非常感兴趣的地区。由于物种的迁移受到地峡上有限的自然环境的影响，而且在过去的几十年里，气候变化极大地改变了环境的混合，因此重建巴拿马的环境历史是对美洲古生态学和古人类学进行广泛研究的一个关键方面。该项目是一个更大的综合努力的一部分，旨在收集和解释证据，从而大大提高对巴拿马环境历史的认识。从巴拿马分散的湖泊和沼泽中收集的沉积物岩心，其中两组提供了长达26,000年的时期的特别好的记录。本项目将重点在实验室分析两组岩心，利用岩心中的花粉、硅藻和植物岩来重建岩心遗址附近的物种范围。这些数据将与其他地点的数据结合起来，形成比以前更完整的巴拿马环境变化记录。这个项目将加强以数据为基础的巴拿马环境历史，这本身就具有重要意义，但它也将有助于学者们进行许多其他方面的研究。更精确的植被变化重建将使气候学家能够完善区域气候历史，这将有助于仲裁当前关于冰川后气候变化本质的理论争论。生物学家和生物地理学家将有更详细的数据来分析物种迁移和对环境变化的反应特征。人类学家将发现，通过驯化植物的花粉和植物岩的存在，这些数据有助于更好地确定人类居住的时间和地点。因此，这个项目为在广泛的科学领域增加知识提供了机会。

Because of its critical location as a landbridge linking North and South America, Panama has been an area of intense interest to climatologists, biologists, anthropologists, geographers, and other scientists trying to reconstruct and interpret the distribution and movements of plants, animals, and people in the Americas. Because movements of species have been influenced by the limited number of natural environments on the isthmus, and because climatic changes have altered the mix of environments dramatically over the last few dozen millennia, reconstructing the environmental history of Panama is a critical facet of research for a broad range of inquiries into the paleoecology and paleoanthropology of the Americas. This project is part of a larger, integrated effort to gather and interpret evidence that will substantially improve knowledge of the environmental history of Panama. Sediment cores have been gathered from lakes and bogs in scattered parts of Panama, two sets of which provide especially good records over periods as long as the last 26,000 years. This project will focus on analyzing the two sets of cores in laboratories, using pollen, diatoms, and phytoliths in the cores to reconstruct the range of species present in the vicinities of the core sites. These data will be integrated with data from other sites to develop more complete records of environmental change in Panama than have been available before. The enhancement of the data-based environmental history of Panama that will result from this project is significant in its own right, but it also will assist scholars in many other lines of inquiry. More accurate reconstructions of vegetational change will permit climatologists to refine regional climatic histories, which will help arbitrate current theoretical debates regarding the nature of post- glacial climatic change. Biologists and biogeographers will have more detailed data for their analyses of the migration of species and the character of response to environmental change. Anthropologists will find the data useful for better determining the timing and location of human occupancy through the presence of pollen and phytoliths of domesticated plants. This project therefore provides opportunities for increasing knowledge in a broad range of sciences.