Paleontologists go back to the future, reconstruct fossilized functional diversity to inform conservation goals
Key points
- Scientists have demonstrated for the first time that functional diversity can be accurately inferred from the marine fossil record.
- Functional diversity, which measures the processes that take place within an ecosystem, is often more informative than biodiversity (the number of species in an ecosystem) for conservationists trying to restore and protect environments.
- This is a boon for the nascent field of conservation paleobiology, in which scientists compare healthy fossilized ecosystems to those from modern times that have been denuded by humans, thereby learning which functions or species are now missing and need to be restored.
Carrie Tyler is a paleontologist who uses the fossil record to reconstruct ancient food webs. This is a challenging undertaking, given that the fossil record is full of holes that encompass vast stretches of time and many types of organisms that have disappeared without a trace. Thus, every food web she’s able to resurrect from the past is bound to have missing parts, which may lead to biased conclusions.
Tyler is well aware of this problem, and over the last ten years, she’s worked with Michal Kowalewski, the Florida Museum of Natural History’s Thompson chair of invertebrate paleontology, to construct and analyze a massive dataset of marine fossils to determine just how big the problem is. Tyler and Kowalewski recently published their results in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which they’re relieved to say that the fossil record, though patchy, is capable of preserving information about the functional diversity of past ecosystems.
“Functional diversity is a really important aspect of food webs,” Tyler said. “When I construct a fossil food web, I group things together based on the types of functions they perform, and then I add the ways in which they interact on top. But if I want to do that, I have to know that the data I’m working with are reliable.”
Functional diversity, which tracks whether biological processes are running smoothly, is also a critical part of conservation. With the results of this study, conservationists can now compare healthy ecosystems from the recent past to their modern counterparts that have been altered by humans. They can then use this information to set goals that will restore and protect these environments in the future.