NSFGEO-NERC: VERTEBRATE FUNCTIONAL TRAITS AS INDICATORS OF ECOSYSTEM FUNCTION THROUGH DEEP AND SHALLOW TIME-Jason Head -NSF-NERC (NSF is the lead)

Animals interact with their environments via specific sets of traits. The structure of their teeth allows animals to process food efficiently. The orientation of their feet allows animals to move across the landscape to attain food and avoid predation. These trait-environment relationships have co-evolved over long timespans. However, habitat alteration and modern climate change has the potential to rapidly disrupt the balance. Animal communities that possess a full suite of traits that are functionally matched to environmental conditions maintain ecosystem processes. However, habitat loss, climate change, and extinction fundamentally alter the fit of traits to their environments. Changes in the composition and diversity of ecometric traits can signal the imminent collapse of an ecosystem toward the approach of ecological tipping points. 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.

We will analyze trait-environment relationships across Africa and through time over the past 7.5 million years. In doing so, we 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. We will do this with a novel multi-trait and multi-taxonomic approach to capture feeding, locomotor, and physiological functional aspects of terrestrial vertebrate ecosystems. Our efforts will produce an extensive database of hard-to-gather functional traits from African museum specimens that will be publicly reposited. This proposal will provide project personnel 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. We will develop learning modules for training East African students in collections-based research. We will create museum exhibits highlighting and explaining trait-environment relationships in Kenya and the UK, reaching nearly 1 million visitors per year. To translate our research into actionable conservation initiatives, we will rely on the co-production of knowledge by involving conservation groups at all stages of research planning. We will also hold a conservation action workshop at the end to discuss outcomes and direct applications.