Collaborative Research: EVOLUTION OF NORTH AMERICAN SMALL MAMMAL COMMUNITIES IN RESPONSE TO OLIGO-MIOCENE LANDSCAPE CHANGE

This project aims to understand the relationship over millions of years between vegetation and mammalian communities. Small mammals in particular are more sensitive to habitat change than their larger relatives, so the team will examine this relationship over time and space to develop a robust understanding of how they respond to changing landscapes. This work is critical both to understanding how habitat changes in the past have shaped the animals living on the landscape and to developing models that will allow us to recognize and potentially mitigate impacts of current human-driven habitat alteration on mammalian species. The work will also integrate undergraduate and graduate students and K-12 teachers into the process, giving them all a view into ongoing research and disseminating the research results as the work is being conducted so it can advance public understanding of ecology and evolution. The team will study patterns of habitat change and ecological evolution in the U.S. Great Plains and Northwest from 30 to 5 million years ago. They will collect fossil small mammals and sediment for phytolith extraction through fieldwork in the Northwest to build a record of the ecological structure of faunas and floras to compare with the well-studied Great Plains. Mammal diet, body size, and locomotion will be estimated from dental and skeletal proxies. These data will be used to compare the structure of small mammal communities to local habitat data inferred from phytolith assemblages, to determine the influence of changing habitats on faunal ecology. They expect that changes through time in habitat openness and heterogeneity will lead to differences in the guild structure of small mammals in those ecosystems. Differences in habitat changes between the study regions offer an opportunity to test the degree to which ecological responses of small mammals to habitat change are consistent and predictable.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.