NSFDEB-NERC: Collaborative Research: Vertebrate functional traits as indicators of ecosystem function through deep and shallow time

动物通过一系列特定的特征与环境相互作用。例如，牙齿形状的变化使动物能够有效地处理不同的食物，肢体结构的变化使动物能够在不同的栖息地移动以获取食物并避免捕食者。动物特征和环境条件之间的关系通常在很长一段时间内共同进化。然而，栖息地的改变和气候变化有可能迅速破坏经过许多代人改进的现有关系。现代生态学面临的一个重要挑战是确定哪些特征是维持生态系统功能所必需的，但由于特征-环境相互作用在很长的时间尺度上表现出来，推断生态系统退化需要化石记录提供的独特的历史视角。在这个项目中，研究人员计划分析整个非洲和过去750万年的性状-环境关系，试图理清人类进化和环境变化对整个动物群落的性状分布和功能的影响。该项目为早期职业科学家提供国际合作经验，旨在将研究成果转化为学习模块和博物馆展品，并计划通过与国际生物科学联盟的非洲保护古生物学项目合作，帮助制定保护规划。研究人员将采用一种新的多性状和多分类方法来捕捉非洲生态系统中陆生脊椎动物的摄食、运动和生理功能方面。其目的是建立一个广泛的数据库，从非洲博物馆的标本中收集难以收集的功能特征，并将其公之于众。利用生态计量学关系和古气候数据（例如稳定的碳同位素）的结合，研究人员计划确定不断变化的环境条件与人类活动对非洲大部分地区和地质时期哺乳动物和鳞片动物的一系列特征的相对影响。生态计量学关系是不依赖于分类学组成的群落水平、功能性状与环境的联系。因此，这些关系可以通过空间和时间进行推广。经济计量学领域提供了一个定量框架，不仅可以评估性状与它们所处的环境条件之间的关系，还可以评估这些关系被外在因素破坏的时间。通过检查不同时间尺度上的生态计量关系，研究人员将确定性状-环境关系与生态系统功能的关系，并计算防止非洲生态系统转向动物衰竭状态所需的性状空间占用程度。研究人员还将评估生态计量关系，以重建过去750万年非洲脊椎动物生态系统变化的开始、速度和模式，然后利用这些历史来预测未来的变化，与保护组织共同产生知识，为保护决策提供信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Animals interact with their environments via specific sets of traits, or characteristics. For example, tooth shape has adapted to enable animals to process different foods efficiently, and variation in limb structure allows animals to move across the landscape to attain food and avoid predation across different habitats. Relationships between animal characteristics and environmental conditions typically co-evolve over long timespans. However, habitat alteration and climate change have the potential to rapidly disrupt existing relationships that have been refined over many generations. An important challenge in modern ecology is to identify which traits are necessary to maintain ecosystem function, but because trait-environment interactions manifest over long timescales, inferring ecosystem degradation requires a historical perspective uniquely provided by the fossil record. In this project, the researchers plan to analyze trait-environment relationships across Africa and through time over the past 7.5 million years in an attempt to disentangle the effects of hominine evolution and environmental change on trait distributions and function for entire communities of animals. This project provides international collaborative experiences for early career scientists, it aims to translate research findings into learning modules and museum exhibits, and plans to aid conservation planning through a partnership with the Conservation Paleobiology in Africa Program of the International Union of Biological Sciences. The researchers will employ a novel multi-trait and multi-taxonomic approach to capture feeding, locomotor, and physiological functional aspects of terrestrial vertebrates in African ecosystems. The aim is to produce an extensive database of hard-to-gather functional traits from African museum specimens that will be made publicly available. Using a combination of ecometric relationships and paleoclimate data, e.g. stable carbon isotopes, the researchers plan to identify the relative influence of changing environmental conditions versus anthropogenic activities on suites of traits for mammals and squamates across much of Africa and over geologic time. Ecometric relationships are community-level, functional trait-environment links that do not depend on taxonomic composition. Thus, these relationships are generalizable through space and time. The field of ecometrics provides a quantitative framework for assessing not only the relationship between traits and the environmental conditions in which they are found, but also times when those relationships were disrupted by extrinsic factors. By examining ecometric relationships at different temporal scales, the researchers will identify what trait-environment relationships relate to ecosystem function and calculate the degree of trait space occupancy necessary to prevent African ecosystems from tipping to a faunally depauperate state. The researchers will also evaluate ecometric relationships to reconstruct the onset, tempo, and mode of African vertebrate ecosystem change over the past 7.5 million years and will then use these histories to forecast future change, co-producing knowledge with conservation groups to inform conservation decisions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.