Bethany Pittard

"Utilizes the fossil record to provide the empirical data on long-term interactions between biodiversity, climate, and human impacts. "

PhD project title:

Using past archives to constrain baselines in avian biodiversity.

 

Bethany Pittard

Project description:

Although birds number ~11,000 species today, 40% are in population decline, with 20% of species identified as at risk of extinction. Broadly, it is expected that ongoing climatic and environmental changes will result in a loss of avian biodiversity and a polewards shift in their geographic distributions. However, such forecasts are based entirely on very recent records. As such, our concepts of baselines of avian biodiversity, including extinction rate and selectivity, are severely distorted by the narrow temporal lens through which they are viewed.

The emerging field of conservation palaeobiology utilizes the fossil record to provide the only empirical data on long-term interactions between biodiversity, climate, and human impacts. This rich archive preserves information on past avian geographic distributions and climates different from those in the present day, including time intervals characterised by climatic conditions potentially analogous to near-future scenarios. Perhaps most importantly, it enables us to decouple the distorting effects of human influence on biodiversity, providing our only evidence of ‘normal’ extinction rate dynamics.

Using and contributing to The Paleobiology Database, this project will harness the rich fossil and zooarchaeological record of birds to understand how past avian extinctions were affected by long-term climatic changes over the last few million years (Plio-Pleistocene), and, more recently, by prehistoric human impacts. I will produce the first sampling-standardized regional baselines for avian biodiversity estimates prior to human impacts and before globalisation. Combined with collecting ecomorphological data (e.g. body size proxies) from avian fossils, this will enable the identification of unevenness in past extinctions across different taxonomic groups, ecomorphological categories, and geographical regions. I will also quantify how much ecomorphological diversity has been lost during this time interval.

This project will produce results that have implications for the past, present, and future of avian biodiversity. It will also dovetail with the recently developed IUCN Green Status of Species, which incorporates longer-term species trajectories to measure recovery against historical baselines. 
 

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