Impact of climatic and environmental variability on faunal composition and distribution of molluscan and mammalian faunas in Eastern Africa

对于不同生态系统的动物群，人们假设气候变化和动物群变化之间存在因果关系（Bromage和Schrenk，1999年）。该项目的目的是通过详细分析东非陆地和湖泊群落结构的时间和地理背景来检验这些假设。对于陆生动物区系的解释主要来自于对哺乳动物群落生态变量的分析，如食性、体型和运动偏好。对于湖泊软体动物区系，利用分子生物学方法和地理信息学分析，可以建立一个追踪环境变化的框架。通过结合这两种策略，我们希望能够开发一个时间和地理上的精细尺度的区域东非模型的栖息地和动物群的变化，可以链接到非洲的气候变化模型中的中新世-更新世，并提供洞察湖泊和陆地的相互依存关系的演变过程中的相互关系和气候变化。

The causal link between climatic and faunal change has been hypothezised for faunal groups of different ecosystems (Bromage and Schrenk 1999). The aim of this project is to test these hypotheses by detailed analyses of Eastern African terrestrial and lacustrine community structures in a temporal and geographical context. For the terrestrial fauna interpretations are derived mainly from the analysis of ecovariables of mammalian communities, such as feeding habit, body size and locomotion preferences. For the lacustrine molluscan fauna a framework to trace environmental change is available with the utilization of molecular methods and phylogeographic analysis. By combining both strategies we expect to be able to develop a temporally and geographically fine scaled regional East African model of habitat and faunal change which can be linked to models of climate change in the African Mio-Plio-Pleistocene and provide insight into interdependencies of lacustrine and terrestrial evolutionary processes in relation to each other and to climatic change.