Vertebrate Functional Traits As Indicators Of Ecosystem Function Through Deep And Shallow Time

Animals interact with their environments through specific traits, such as the structure of their teeth, which enables them to process food efficiently. These trait-environment relationships have co-evolved over long timespans and maintain ecosystem processes and balances, however, habitat alteration and modern climate change have the potential to rapidly disrupt the balance. An important challenge in modern ecology is to identify which traits are necessary to maintain ecosystem functions. However, because trait-environment interactions manifest over long timescales, inferring ecosystem degradation requires the historical perspective uniquely provided by the fossil record.

This project aims to analyze trait-environment relationships across Africa and through time over the past 7.5 million years. In doing so, it will disentangle the effects of hominine evolution and environmental change on ecosystem function and determine the point at which the critical loss of traits results in ecosystem collapse. This proposal will provide project personnel with international collaborative experiences in the translation of research findings into learning modules, museum exhibits, and conservation planning through partnering with the Conservation Paleobiology in Africa Program of the International Union of Biological Sciences. Moreover, it will develop learning modules for training East African students in collections-based research and create museum exhibits highlighting and explaining trait-environment relationships in Kenya and the UK, reaching nearly 1 million visitors per year.