Collaborative Research: Megafauna Extinction, Ecosystem Disruption, and Climate Change in Australia: Assessing the Human Factor

该奖项是为了支持一个合作项目（科罗拉多大学、贝茨学院和华盛顿卡内基研究所），该项目旨在研究更新世现代人在澳大利亚殖民的影响。研究人员假设，人类的燃烧活动破坏了整个内陆的生态系统的稳定，以至于一大部分依赖的动物灭绝了，这种生态系统的变化最终导致了内陆有效湿度的降低。这项研究包括一个紧密集中的实地活动，以获得主要的收集品，并对这些样品进行协调分析，重点研究它们的物理特征、地质年代学和作为古植被代用物的碳同位素。通过评估Genyornis的饮食是否在濒临灭绝时发生了前所未有的变化，研究人员可以测试人类捕食（没有预期的饮食变化）或生态系统崩溃（预期的饮食调整以适应这些变化）是更可能的灭绝机制。

This award is for support of a collaborative project (between University of Colorado, Bates College, and the Carnegie Institute of Washington) to study the impact of Pleistocene colonization of Australia by modern humans. The investigators hypothesize that human burning activities destabilized ecosystems across the interior such that a large segment of the dependent fauna became extinct, and that this ecosystem change ultimately led to reduced effective moisture over the interior. The study involves a tightly focussed field campaign to acquire primary collections, and a coordinated analytical program for these samples concentrating on their physical characteristics, geochronology, and carbon isotopes as a paleovegetation proxy. By evaluating whether unparalleled shifts in the diet of Genyornis occurred as extinction approached the investigators can test whether human predation (no expected dietary change) or ecosystem collapse (expected adjustment of diet to meet these changes) is the more probable extinction mechanism.