Environmental sorting of vertebrate faunas: Is guild-level locomotor and dietary ecomorphology an indicator of paleoenvironment?

脊椎动物群的环境分选：行会水平的运动和饮食生态形态是古环境的一个指标吗？群落和物种如何应对环境变化？这个问题对保护生态学家、生物学家和古生物学家来说很重要，因为这些问题的答案有助于理解是什么原理影响了哪些物种在一个群落中被发现在一起，这些物种及其群落将如何应对不断变化的气候和环境，以及我们如何从地质记录中的化石组合中更好地确定过去的气候和环境。该项目将重点关注北美的气候和环境参数如何与两个主要生物群体（哺乳动物食肉类和蛇类）的陆生食肉动物的平均运动和饮食相关联，这两个生物群体都有各自的生理和运动专业化，但它们在生态上都是相同群落的高营养级食肉动物。该项目将研究物种的两种特性如何在群落中共存？运动和饮食？都与大陆范围内的气候和环境有关。我们预计，一个群落中的物种将各自为自己的生态位而专业化，但同时我们预计，局部地区的大规模气候和环境将限制群落内可能出现的分化范围（例如，生活在北极苔原群落中的所有物种都必须共享使它们能够在该环境中生活的专业化）。我们的目标是确定气候和环境在多大程度上与运动和饮食专业化的地理分布相关，以评估使用这些系统从化石群落推断过去当地陆地气候和环境的可能性。我们的方法是定量的和地理上全面的。从博物馆的藏品中，我们将测量来自北美各地的食肉动物和蛇的四肢、身体和牙齿，目标是为这两个群体中的每一个北美物种获得20个或更多个体的样本，并在整个地理范围内获得10个或更多的样本。我们还将测量更新世食肉动物的四肢和牙齿，以便将我们的结果应用于晚第四纪的古环境重建。这些测量结果将使用地理信息系统（GIS）方法进行汇总，以绘制整个北美地区运动和饮食的社区水平模式，以研究它们与气候参数的关系，我们将从这种联系中重建更新世的气候和环境，并根据其他证据对重建的气候模型进行测试。

Environmental sorting of vertebrate faunas: Is guild-level locomotor and dietary ecomorphology an indicator of paleoenvironment?P. David Polly How do communities and species respond to environmental change? This question is important to conservation ecologists, biologists and paleontologists because the answers help understand what principles influence which species are found together in a community, how those species and their community will respond to changing climates and environments, and how we can better determine past climates and environments from assemblages of fossils in the geological record. This project will focus on how climatic and environmental parameters in North America are associated with the average locomotion and diet in terrestrial carnivores from two major biological groups, the mammalian Carnivora and snakes, each of which have their individual physiological and locomotor specializations, but both of which function ecologically as high-trophic level carnivores in the same communities. The project will study how two properties of the species coexisting in communities ? locomotion and diet ? are associated with climate and environment on a continental scale. We expect that species within a community will each be specialized for their own niches, but at the same time we expect that the large-scale climate and environment in a local area will restrict the range of differentiation that is possible within a community (all species living in an arctic tundra community, for example, must share specializations that allow them to live in that environment). Our goal is to determine the extent to which climate and environment are associated with the geographic distribution of locomotor and dietary specializations to assess the possibility of inferring past local terrestrial climates and environment from fossil communities using these systems.Our approach is quantitative and geographically comprehensive. From museum collections, we will take measurements of limbs, bodies, and dentitions of carnivorans and snakes from across North America, with the goal of obtaining a sample of 20 or more individuals for every North American species in these two groups and of obtaining samples of 10 or more across the entire geographic range of selected widespread species. We will also measure limbs and dentitions from Pleistocene carnivorans in order to apply our results to late Quaternary paleoenvironment reconstruction. These measurements will be assembled using Geographic Information System (GIS) methods to map the community-level patterns in locomotion and diet across the whole of North America to study how they are associated with climatic parameters and we will reconstruct Pleistocene climate and environment from this association and test that reconstruction against climate models based on other lines of evidence.