What are we missing in trying to read this world by the inappropriate scale of our small bodies and minuscule lifetimes?
Stephen J. Gould, 1998, p. 314, Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. London B
What it’s all about
My doctoral research probes the macroecological consequences of biotic competition and abiotic resource limitation in marine invertebrate communities. In other words, I test ideas about why species exist where they do in space and time, and especially why some species coexist and others go extinct. On a daily basis, I write computer code to analyze complex data sets, including building species distribution models (a.k.a. ecological niche modeling). These approaches fall under the remit of “macroecology” and “stratigraphic paleobiology,” interdisciplinary fields that bridge spatial ecology, evolutionary biology, and stratigraphy.
I test ideas about why species exist where they do in space and time
Fossil invertebrates are my main study groups. Shallow marine-dwellers with shells, such as bivalves and brachiopods, are particularly useful because so many of them have preserved in the rock record.
Why it matters
Geographic range size interacts with traits at every level of the biological hierarchy from individuals to ecosystems. Species’ ranges relate to individual characters such as body size, population-level parameters such as abundance, and species-level attributes such as extinction rate. Physical conditions restrict species’ occurrences, and species interact to influence each others’ distributions. The degree to which biotic competition vs. abiotic conditions control species’ geographic patterns, and hence community composition, has profound implications for major theories such as adaptive radiation, resource limitation, ecological saturation, diversity-dependent radiation, and species selection.
When and where I do it
Each unit of the biological hierarchy functions at a different spatio-temporal scale, so I advocate for quantifying spatial distribution patterns at multiple resolutions. At the biggest scale, I look at species’ distributions across all oceans over the entire course of the Phanerozoic (540 Ma). At an intermediate scale, I work in the Western Atlantic over the Neogene and Quaternary (23 Ma). At the finest scale, I use field data from sediment beds (ca. 10,000 year resolution) in a single basin.
