期刊
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
卷 277, 期 1685, 页码 1193-1201出版社
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1984
关键词
conservation palaeobiology; taphonomy; live-dead analysis; baselines; Great Basin; small mammals
资金
- National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship Program
- Environmental Protection Agency Science
- National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration
- Geological Society of America Student Research
- American Society of Mammalogists
- University of Chicago
- National Science Foundation [EAR-0448461]
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Conservation and restoration efforts are often hindered by a lack of historical baselines that pre-date intense anthropogenic environmental change. In this paper I document that natural accumulations of skeletal remains represent a potential source of high-quality data on the historical composition and structure of small-mammal communities. I do so by assessing the fidelity of modern, decadal and centennial-scale time-averaged samples of skeletal remains (concentrated by raptor predation) to the living small-mammal communities from which they are derived. To test the power of skeletal remains to reveal baseline shifts, I employ the design of a natural experiment, comparing two taphonomically similar Great Basin cave localities in areas where anthropogenic land-use practices have diverged within the last century. I find relative stasis at the undisturbed site, but document rapid restructuring of the small-mammal community at the site subjected to recent disturbance. I independently validate this result using historical trapping records to show that dead remains accurately capture both the magnitude and direction of this baseline shift. Surveys of skeletal remains therefore provide a simple, powerful and rapid alternative approach for gaining insight into the historical structure and dynamics of modern small-mammal communities.
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