Chairs
Professor Erin Saupe, University of Oxford, UK
Professor Erin Saupe, University of Oxford, UK
Erin Saupe is a Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Oxford, Department of Earth Sciences. Her research investigates the interactions between life and environments over geological time scales. She is specifically interested in elucidating the controls on community and species’ responses to environmental change across various spatial and temporal scales, with focus on the degree to which the fossil record can inform current conservation efforts. Before joining the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford, she was a research fellow at the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies at Yale University and also was the recipient of an EAR NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship. She received a BA in Natural Sciences from the College of St. Benedict (USA) in 2007, and a PhD in palaeobiology from the University of Kansas (USA) in 2014.
09:00-09:05
Welcome by the Royal Society and lead organiser
09:05-09:30
Testing the effects of multi-stressor global change in deep time
Professor Matthew Clapham, UC Santa Cruz, USA
Abstract
The oceans are being transformed as temperature, pH, and oxygen content all change at rates unprecedented in the recent geological past, but predicting vulnerability to these stressors remains a challenge. However, similar events of rapid climate change have occurred repeatedly in Earth’s deep time past. As a result, the fossil record provides opportunities to test hypothesized effects of climate change on the marine biosphere. For example, are more active organisms less vulnerable to climate change stressors? Are tropical organisms at greater risk of extinction, or does environmental variability influence survival? Can direct physiological stresses from temperature be reconstructed at the level of an individual organism? The nature of the fossil record limits the types of questions that can be asked, but its record of biotic change over evolutionary timescales and at global scales provides a complementary perspective that is difficult to obtain from experiments or observations on the extant biota. Extinction patterns in the fossil record help constrain the mechanisms through which climate change disrupts the biosphere and provide clues that reveal, at a broad scale, the groups that may be especially vulnerable during the coming decades.
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Professor Matthew Clapham, UC Santa Cruz, USA
Professor Matthew Clapham, UC Santa Cruz, USA
Matthew E. Clapham is a professor in the department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received a PhD in paleontology in 2006 from the University of Southern California, focusing on ecological changes and extinctions during the Permian. His current research interests include macroecological trends in the history of life and the physiological selectivity of mass extinctions, particularly focusing on the use of global change events in deep time to test the effects of temperature, oxygen, and pH on marine organisms.
09:45-10:15
A conservation paleobiological perspective on Chesapeake Bay oysters
Professor Rowan Lockwood, College of William & Mary, USA
Abstract
The eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) plays a vital role in Chesapeake Bay habitats, acting as an ecosystem engineer and improving water quality via filtration. Populations of bay oysters have declined precipitously in recent decades, primarily due to human harvesting and disease. By the time oyster monitoring was established in the 1940s, reefs were already decimated, suggesting that scientists have never actually observed a healthy reef in the Chesapeake Bay. The fossil record, which preserves 500,000 years of once-thriving reefs, provides a unique opportunity to study pristine reefs and a possible baseline for oyster mitigation.
For this study, over 4000 fossil oysters were examined from 11 Pleistocene localities in the mid-Atlantic US. Data on oyster shell lengths, lifespans, growth rates, and population density were assessed relative to data from modern oyster monitoring surveys, in addition to archeological and historical sources. Comparisons to modern C. virginica, sampled from similar environmental conditions, reveal that fossil oysters were significantly larger, longer-lived, and an order of magnitude more abundant than modern oysters. This pattern results from the preferential harvesting of larger, reproductively more active females from the modern population.
These fossil data, when combined with modern estimates of age-based fecundity and mortality, make it possible to estimate biological function in these long-dead reefs, including carbonate production and filtering capacity. Conservation paleobiology can provide us with a picture of what the Chesapeake Bay looked like, but also how it functioned before humans.
11:00-11:30
Marine ecosystem responses to temperature-related stressors through time
Professor Wolfgang Kiessling, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Abstract
We know that current climate change is already affecting biological systems at global scale, and temperature-related stressors (TRS) are often invoked to explain ecosystem changes in deep time. Without the direct anthropogenic stressors complicating responses, we can (1) potentially better isolate the impact of TRS in the past than today and (2) see under which circumstances TRS lead to ecosystem collapse or mass extinctions. There are many complicating issues such as the vastness of geological time, implying large uncertainties about rates of change, the scarcity of non-skeletal organisms in fossil ecosystems, and different players, which perhaps did things differently in the past. However, simulations and new analytical approaches may help reveal time-invariant principles.
Insights from past responses to TRS may then allow going beyond current approaches in conservation paleobiology and predict the fate of ecosystems under increasing TRS. For example, tropical reef systems have always collapsed under acute global warming rather than cooling and traits of reef corals are significantly linked to their extinction risk. Focussing on marine systems, Kiessling will first summarise the lessons we have already learnt from the past and then provide some guidelines towards a better integration of palaeobiological knowledge in conservation biology.
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Professor Wolfgang Kiessling, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Professor Wolfgang Kiessling, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Wolfgang Kiessling is professor and chair of palaeobiology and palaeoenvironments at FAU Erlangen. His research targets ecological and evolutionary processes on large spatial scales and on time scales from decades to millions of years. Focusing on patterns in deep time, he aims at extracting general principles of the interplay between earth system change and biodiversity dynamics in marine ecosystems. His research focuses on coral reefs but also explores the link between climate change and ecological and evolutionary changes in other marine systems.
After finishing his PhD in palaeontology (FAU, 1995) he did postdoctoral work at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin and the University of Chicago. He became Lichtenberg professor at Humboldt University (Berlin) in 2006 and moved back to FAU in 2012.
11:45-12:15
Are “living fossil” taxa likely to contribute to future evolutionary potential?
Dr Dominic Bennett, University of Gothenberg, Sweden
Abstract
Are evolutionary distinct species – what may fancifully be called “living fossils” – more or less likely to diversify in the future? The various forms of evidence and argumentation for how evolutionary distinctness may be a predictor of evolutionary potential are mixed. Depending on the scientific discipline and the data, these taxa may either be doomed to extinction or primed for future diversification. With an increasing focus of conservation effort towards the evolutionary distinct, such a question is of growing importance. If it is shown that these “living fossils” have higher rates of extinction and lower rates of speciation, then it may be argued that time and resources should not be spent on these evolutionary dead-ends. Conversely, if these groups can be identified as evolutionary fuses then it may be argued that their conservation is key to safeguarding future biodiversity. Here we map the fates of mammalian clades through time to their evolutionary distinctnesses. We find that taxa that are evolutionary distinct have increasing measures of evolutionary distinctness through time. This indicates that these groups have lower rates of speciation but also lower rates of extinction and, as such, represent neither dead-ends nor fuses. Our finding recasts the conservation arguments: protecting the evolutionary distinct will not secure the future of life; it will, however, not be a wasted effort either.
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Dr Dominic Bennett, University of Gothenberg, Sweden
Dr Dominic Bennett, University of Gothenberg, Sweden
Dominic Bennett is a post-doctoral researcher in the Antonelli Lab at the University of Gothenburg and Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre, Sweden. As part of his research, he develops new approaches and software modules for automating and improving the generation of phylogenetic trees. Dominic gained his BSc and MRes from Imperial College London in biological science and recently completed his PhD at Imperial College London and the Zoological Society London in palaeobiology and macroevolution. His PhD project focussed on macroevolutionary trends – with a focus on the concept of the living fossil – to test whether past evolutionary performance is a predictor of future evolutionary performance. To learn more, see Dominic’s Google Scholar and GitHub profiles.