CAREER: Environmental Change and Extinction on the Mammoth Steppe

职业：猛犸草原的环境变化和灭绝

• 批准号: 1753186
• 负责人: Jacquelyn Gill
• 金额: $ 79.38万
• 依托单位: University of Maine
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-05-01 至 2024-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1753186&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Environmental; Change; Extinction; Mammoth; CAREER; Environmental; Change; Extinction; Mammoth

During the last ice age, large parts of the Arctic were covered in diverse, productive grasslands that supported large populations of mammoths, bison, and other large grazers. This "mammoth steppe" habitat disappeared by 10,000 years ago, along with the megafauna who lived there, but it is still unknown whether their extinction was a cause or an effect of habitat loss. Large herbivores play important roles in maintaining the health of grasslands in modern ecosystems, but the role they played in ice age landscapes is less clear. This project will reconstruct ecological prehistory across Beringia, the ice age land bridge that connected Asia and North America, to establish the timing and nature of extinction, environmental change, and habitat loss. Herbivores remain some of the most threatened animals today, so understanding the "Serengeti of the ice age" can help in the management of Earth's largest animals today, and may provide insights into the role native grazers play in a warming Arctic. This project also will provide education, mentoring, and training for students from middle school to graduate school (including a majority first-generation college student population), who will work collaboratively on this project in the field and in the lab. Project results will be incorporated into a student-designed ice age virtual reality game, and implemented in middle schools by newly trained college student "science ambassadors" to provide cutting-edge science experiences for students in rural, low-income, communities. The research will be conducted in several protected Arctic locations, including Bering Land Bridge National Reserve, Wrangel Island Reserve (a UNESCO World Heritage site and the last known location of woolly mammoths on Earth), and Pleistocene Park, which also will benefit from these results. This project aims to understand the relationship between megaherbivores, vegetation, and environmental change in the mammoth steppe, using new high-resolution, multi-proxy records of megaherbivore collapse, paleovegetation, fire, and climate, from four sites in western and eastern Beringia, including the last dated location of woolly mammoths on Earth. Methods include a mix of traditional (e.g., pollen, charcoal) and emerging (ancient DNA, molecular paleoclimate proxies) approaches that will provide opportunities for interdisciplinary training and education in Quaternary environments. These state-of-the-art paleoenvironmental reconstructions will immerse a cooperative team of graduate, undergraduate, and high school students in field-based, cross-disciplinary cooperative learning and research experiences based around data-informed ice age virtual reality experiences for middle schoolers, with a goal of broadening participation of rural and first-generation college students in STEM. Results will test and refine hypotheses for the ecological context and consequences of megafaunal extinctions, which have implications for interpreting paleorecords and the conservation of modern keystone species in a warming world.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.

在最后一个冰河时代，北极的大部分地区被多种生产的草原覆盖，这些草原支持大量的猛mm，野牛和其他大型放牧者。这个“猛mm象草原”的栖息地在10，000年前与居住在那里的Megafauna一起消失了，但仍然不知道它们的灭绝是栖息地损失的原因还是影响。大型食草动物在维持现代生态系统中的草原健康方面发挥了重要作用，但是它们在冰河时代景观中的作用尚不清楚。该项目将重建整个Beringia，与亚洲和北美相连的冰河时代陆桥，以建立灭绝，环境变化和栖息地丧失的时机和性质。食草动物仍然是当今最受威胁的动物，因此了解“冰河时代的塞伦盖蒂”可以帮助当今地球上最大的动物的管理，并可能对本地放牧者在变暖的北极中扮演的角色有见解。该项目还将为从中学到研究生院的学生（包括大多数第一代学生人口）提供教育，指导和培训，他们将在该领域和实验室中合作。项目结果将纳入学生设计的冰河时代虚拟现实游戏中，并在中学在新训练的大学生“科学大使”中实施，为农村，低收入社区的学生提供尖端的科学经验。这项研究将在几个受保护的北极地区进行，包括白令陆桥国家保护区，弗朗格岛保护区（联合国教科文组织世界遗产和地球上羊毛猛mm象的最后一个已知地点）和更新世公园，这也将从这些结果中受益。该项目旨在了解庞然大物草原中的巨型动物，植被和环境变化之间的关系，使用新的高分辨率，多型多透明的记录，来自西部和东部贝林亚的四个地点，包括羊毛乳头上的羊毛哺乳动物的最后一个过长的位置。方法包括传统（例如花粉，木炭）和新兴（古代DNA，分子古气候代理）方法的混合，这些方法将为第四纪环境中的跨学科培训和教育提供机会。这些最先进的古环境重建将使一支由毕业生，本科生和高中生组成的合作团队，围绕基于数据知识的冰期虚拟现实经验的基于现场的，跨学科的合作学习和研究经验，其目标是扩大农村和第一代学生参与植物。结果将测试和完善假设的假设，以实现Megafaunal灭绝的生态环境和后果，这对解释古搜索的解释和在温暖世界中对现代Keystone物种的保存产生了影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用该基金会的知识优点和广泛影响来评估NSF的法定任务。