Timescales of Biodiversity Change (BioTime)
Life has existed on Earth for approximately 4 billion years and the path of every single organism to have lived on the planet has been changed by the changing environments in which they lived. We can directly study individual organisms responding to changes in environment in the modern day, but extrapolating from these observations to longer timescales (the tens-to-thousands of years over which environmental changes occur, let alone the thousands-to-millions of years over which species evolve) is a major challenge. And yet, understanding and better predicting the effects of environmental change are critical both globally, and particularly in New Mexico, where so many of our communities, industries, and pastimes are being immediately and concretely affected by environmental shifts. Our team brings together scientists with expertise on organisms ranging from the microscopic to the largest that have ever lived, and on timescales from the modern day to millions of years in the geological past to address this challenge. We hope our work will improve predictions of the influence of environmental change on biodiversity in NM and other regions (including everything from plant growth to animal interactions and the emergence of new infectious diseases). On a larger scale, our work should help understand when ecosystems begin to slide towards major extinctions, and when they have slid far enough that they cannot recover. We will then be able to help design strategies to build resilient, sustainable responses to future ecosystem perturbations for the good of all New Mexicans.
Conveners
Corinne Myers, Earth and Planetary Sciences
Jason Moore, Honors College
Felisa Smith, Biology
Members
Fernando Machado Stredel, Biology
Emily Jones, Anthropology
Katheryn Markovitch, Earth and Planetary Sciences
Joseph Galewsky, Earth and Planetary Sciences
Steven Bradfute, Center for Global Health
Tomek Falkowski, Honors College
Michael Andersen, Biology, Director Museum of Southwestern Biology
Research Questions
- How can we scale organism generation time to environmental change and evolutionary timescales?
- How can we identify biospheric tipping points beyond which modern ecosystems begin to collapse? How are these similar/different from identifiable tipping points deeper in the Phanerozoic?
- What is the importance of taxonomic vs. functional diversity in ecosystem resilience? How to link scales of taxonomic change (evolutionary) to functional change (community ecology)?
- What are the multi-temporal consequences of invasive species and disease migration?
- How does this scaling impact environmental justice at short (10s yrs) and long (100s-1000s yrs) timescales?
Contact
We welcome researchers with interests in this topic to email us; we are also eager to engage researchers with expertise in mathematical and computer modeling (especially with time series data) and interest in applying cutting edge analytical techniques to ecological data.
Email: Corinne Myers
Email: Jason Moore
Email: Felisa Smith
