The project is led by Marina Costa Rillo (Univ. Oldenburg), Pincelli Hull (Yale, USA), and Seth Finnegan (UC Berkeley, USA).

In a rapidly changing world, there is an urgent need to understand how communities respond to environmental perturbations of varying magnitudes and rates.

To address this need, the workshop PI’s proposed to integrate timeseries data from ecological and paleontological sources and are now doing so in collaboration with a working group of database and timeseries experts. These timeseries will be used to examine community turnover, spanning from the Modern to millions of years in the past, in response to climate changes, including the current climate crisis (i.e., global warming and biotic change).

The main goal of the project is to “identify those climate change scenarios (in terms of tempo and magnitude) where community turnover scales in step, catastrophically shifts (i.e., tipping points), or remains relatively stable (i.e., coordinated stasis).” This will help to evaluate and understand the relationship, in rates and magnitudes, between climate change and modification of biological communities.