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

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

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.

Main group members: Adam Kocsis, Adam Tomasovych, Amelia Penny, David Fastovich, Erin Saupe, Huai-Hsuan (May) Huang, Jansen A. Smith, John Renaudie, John W. Williams, Lee Hsiang Liow, Maria Azeredo de Dornelas, Mauro Sugawara, Miranda Margulis-Ohnuma, Moriaki Yasuhara, Stephen R. Meyers, Wolfgang Kiessling

The first on-site BioDeepTime Workshop took place from March 27 to March 30!

from the left: Huang Huai Hsuan (May), Erin Saupe, Amelia Penny, Lee Hsiang Liow, Johan Renaudie, Adam Kocsis, Pincelli Hull, Manuel Steinbauer, Marina Costa Rillo, Jansen Smith, Mauro Sugawara, Adam Tomasovych; all other groups members were joining remotely; some of the talks were also attended by students from our institute.

Second on-site BioDeepTime Workshop took place from January 10 – 13!

from the left: Adam Kocsis, Maoli Vizcaino, David Fastovich, Katherine Pippinger, Jansen Smith, Franka Gaiser, Seth Finnegan, Maria Azeredo de Dornelas, Wolfgang Kiessling, Johan Renaudie, Adam Tomasovych, Amelia Penny. Front: Elizabeth Dowding, Marina Costa Rillo; all other groups members were joining remotely.

Publications

“BioDeepTime: a database of biodiversity time series for modern and fossil assemblages” Jansen A. Smith & BioDeepTime; Submitted to Global Ecology and Biogeography