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Research ThemesMacroecology Projects
Mammalian Communities through time. Integrating Macroecologial Pattern and Processes across Scales. The body size of an organism reflects complex tradeoffs among numerous processes. Nevertheless, certain size-dependent relationships are repeatedly observed for mammals and other taxa. For example, the distribution of mammalian body sizes (i.e., minimum, maximum, and modal size) is remarkably similar across continents, despite little speices overlap. Moreover, distributions appear to have been similar for the past 50 million years. Do patterns arise because of common ancestry, because organisms exist in similar environments, or because they face similar design or life history constraints? The broad goal of this project is to assess the generality of body size patterns and investigate general underlying processes. The project assembles an international and distinguished team of scientists with expertise spanning the full spectrum of time, space, and various disciplines (e.g., paleontology, marine and terrestrial ecology, evolutionary biology, genetics). Anticipated results include the development of a comprehensive global database on life history, body size, geography, and phylogenetic relatedness for mammals as well as the development of novel analytical and statistical tools. Collaborators: James Brown (University of New Mexico), Edward Bedrick (University of New Mexico), Alison Boyer (University of New Mexico), Eric Charnov (University of New Mexico), Daniel Costa (University of California Santa Cruz), Tamar Dayan (Tel-Aviv University), Morgan Ernest (Utah State University), Alistair Evans (University of Helsinki), Mikael Fortelius (University of Helsinki), John Gittleman (University of Virginia), Kate Jones (Institute of Zoology, London), Kate Lyons (Smithsonian Institute), Pablo Marquet (Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile), Richard Sibly (University of Reading), Jessica Theodor (University of Calgary), Mark Uhen (Smithsonian Institute). Phanerozoic body size trends in time and space: Macroevolution and macroecology The identification and explanation of long-term evolutionary trends in higher taxa and biological communities is an important goal of biological research. Body size is the single most important ecological characteristic of metazoa and the variable most easily applied to analysis of evolutionary trends across distantly related taxa. The proposed working group will bring together paleobiologists studying body size evolution in deep time and across higher taxa with biologists studying the distribution of body sizes in living organisms from the community to global scale. The working group will initiate a community-wide database of body sizes through the Phanerozoic, an effort that requires standardized data on body size across higher taxa. The working group will also catalyze collaborations between paleobiologists and biologists to develop the theory necessary to investigate long-term dynamics in body-size evolution across diverse living and extinct metazoan lineages. The workshop will provide a venue for members to address the relationships between the pattern of body size evolution and the distribution of body sizes in extant organisms. How well can macroevolutionary patterns be inferred from macroecological ones? How well do those patterns reflect evolutionary mechanisms, whether driven or passive? Ultimately, the resulting database will become a broadly applicable and dynamic resource for macroevolutionary research, with real potential to help future workers shed light on the forces that have shaped the evolutionary trajectory of animal life on Earth. PI's:Jonathan L. Payne (Stanford University), Jennifer Stempien (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University), Michal Kowalewski (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) Collaborators: Alison Boyer (University of New Mexico), James Brown (University of New Mexico), Seth Finnegan (Stanford University), Richard Krause (Museum für Naturkunde der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Kate Lyons (Smithsonian Insititute), Craig R. McClain (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute), Daniel W. McShea (Duke University), Philip M. Novack-Gottshall (University of West Virginia), Steve Wang (Swarthmore College)
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