Avifauna Persistence and Vulnerabilities: Island Biogeography Across Long Time Scales

气候和其他自然环境因素的变化以及与人类有关的土地利用变化对生物多样性产生了一些最大的影响。本研究项目将探讨在各种气候条件和人为环境变化下物种的持续存在和消失的问题，以提高对历史生物地理学的认识。该项目将为物种和生态系统如何应对气候变化的直接和间接影响（包括气温升高和海平面上升）提供新的见解。深入了解物种对过去气候和其他全球变化影响的反应，将提高预测未来变化影响的能力。项目成果将有助于科学地理解全球变化如何影响生态系统及其为人类提供的服务。这些发现将有助于决策者、政府机构和资源管理者评估适当的行动方案，以减轻未来气候变化的影响。该项目还将加强美国和加勒比地区科学家和机构之间的国际研究合作。该项目将岛屿作为了解人类与环境相互作用的微观世界，从多种背景下的恢复力和脆弱性角度分析陆鸟群落的物种特征。它将结合古生物学、放射性碳年代学、古气候和现代动植物群落的数据，建立一个严格的长期生物变化模型。化石的物种水平鉴定将描绘物种群落的变化，这将根据它们特定的生活史特征进行评估，如气候生态位、栖息地偏好、摄食行会和范围属性（广泛与地方性）。一种创新形式的物种分布模型将用于描述每个物种的气候适宜栖息地或“气候包络”，并开发物种-环境关系的定量、经验和预测模型。项目发现将为当代物种分布与气候（以及其他环境预测因素）之间的关系提供新的视角。它们还将允许调查人员“预测”以前时期的物种分布。鉴于人们对自然环境和人类相关变化对生物地理和生物多样性的持续和未来影响的广泛关注，该项目将为以前倾向于依赖模型和预测的研究调查提供丰富的数据背景和验证。

Changes in climate and in other natural environmental factors as well as human-related land-use changes have had some of the greatest impacts on biodiversity. With the goal of enhancing understanding of historic biogeography, this research project will investigate questions about the persistence versus loss of species under a variety of climate-induced conditions and human-caused environmental change. The project will develop new insights regarding how species and ecosystems respond to the direct and indirect effects of changes in climate, including warmer temperatures and rising sea levels. A deeper understanding of species responses to the past effects of climate and other global changes will improve capabilities to forecast the impacts of future changes. Project results will contribute to scientific understanding of how global changes affect ecosystems and the services they provide to humans. The findings will help inform policy makers, governmental agencies, and resource administrators as they assess appropriate courses of action to mitigate effects of future climate change. This project also will strengthen international research collaborations among U.S. and Caribbean scientists and institutions.Using islands as microcosms for understanding human interactions with the environment, this project will analyze species traits of land-bird communities in terms of their resilience versus vulnerability from multiple contexts. It will combine data about paleontology, radiocarbon chronology, paleoclimate, and modern plant and animal communities to develop a rigorous model of long-term biotic change. Species-level identifications of fossils will portray changes in species communities, which will be evaluated in light of their specific life-history traits, such as climatic niche, habitat preference, feeding guild, and range attributes (widespread vs. endemic). An innovative form of species distribution modeling will be used to characterize the climatically suitable habitat or "climate envelope" for each species and develop quantitative, empirical, predictive models of species-environment relationships. Project findings will provide new perspectives about the relationships among contemporary species distributions and climate (and other environmental predictors). They also will permit the investigators to "hindcast" species distributions in previous time periods. Given wide-spread concerns about ongoing and future impacts of natural environmental and human-related changes on biogeography and biodiversity, this project will provide data-rich context and validation for research investigations that previously have tended to rely on modeling and projections.