Quantifying Tiering of Marine Animal Forests Through Deep Time

通过深时间量化海洋动物森林的分层

• 批准号: NE/X011526/1
• 负责人: Imran Rahman
• 金额: $ 8.94万
• 依托单位: Natural History Museum
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FX011526%2F1
• 关键词: Quantifying; Tiering; Marine; Animal; Forests

Marine ecosystems are among the most important on planet Earth, and the guiding ecological and evolutionary principles that have shaped their origins are crucial to understand the world we live in today. One example of this are marine animal forests, which are three-dimensional canopies akin to underwater forests that are primarily comprised of invertebrate animals with biomineralized skeletons, like corals and echinoderms. These ecosystems are cradles of biodiversity in modern oceans, and they play an important role in the carbon cycle due to the abundance of calcium carbonate biomineralizers. Despite their significance, however, the macroevolutionary and macroecological processes underlying the origin and diversification of marine animal forests are not well constrained. In particular, tiering, the vertical subdivision of space by organisms within a community, has been proposed as a driver of diversification in marine benthic communities such as marine animal forests, but this has rarely been quantified. This lack of quantification has hampered comparisons of marine animal forests across different spatial and temporal scales, and a unified framework facilitating study of tiering and its effects on extinct and extant marine ecosystems is currently lacking.In order to understand the origin and evolution of marine animal forests and the role of tiering in structuring these communities, we will devise a quantitative, interdisciplinary approach using cutting-edge statistical methods and computer simulations to investigate tiering in crinoid-dominated marine animal forests. Crinoids are benthic suspension-feeding echinoderms, which have been the poster children for tiering in marine benthic communities since the initial conception of the idea over 40 years ago. They are thus the ideal group with which to tackle this topic.The development of a quantitative approach to tiering has classically been hindered by the absence of complete crinoid fossils, which are necessary to understand the relationship between growth of skeletal elements of the cup, which house the feeding appendages, and the height of the cup above the seafloor. The recent discovery of a new exceptionally-preserved assemblage of Jurassic fossil crinoids from Wiltshire, UK, housed at the Natural History Museum in London, offers the perfect natural laboratory to develop, test, and benchmark a unified framework for quantifying tiering from partial specimens. Once this has been achieved, we will apply our novel framework to quantify tiering in an older Ordovician palaeocommunity and a modern crinoid-dominated marine animal forest to test and ensure the wider applicability of our approach.The outcomes of our work will provide insight into the ecological and evolutionary drivers underlying marine animal forests. Our new analytical tools will be widely applicable to marine benthic communities, opening up novel directions of research in the environmental sciences.

海洋生态系统是地球上最重要的生态系统之一，塑造其起源的指导生态和进化原理对于了解我们今天生活的世界至关重要。一个例子是海洋动物森林，它们是类似于水下森林的三维顶篷，主要由具有生物矿化骨骼的无脊椎动物组成，例如珊瑚和棘皮动物。这些生态系统是现代海洋中生物多样性的摇篮，由于碳酸钙生物矿化剂的丰富度，它们在碳循环中起着重要作用。然而，尽管它们的意义，但海洋动物森林起源和多样化的基础的宏观进化过程和宏观生态过程并没有得到很好的限制。特别是，已经提议将一个社区内生物体的空间垂直细分划分为海洋底栖群落（如海洋动物森林）的多元化驱动力，但很少对此进行量化。这种缺乏量化的缺乏阻碍了在不同的空间和时间尺度上的海洋动物森林的比较，以及统一的框架促进对分层的研究及其对灭绝和现存的海洋生态系统的影响，目前缺乏统一的统计量，我们将在统计中构成统计学的统计量，以了解阶梯的作用，我们将在统计上的作用，我们将分裂构成统计学，我们将构建阶段，使方法构成方法。计算机模拟以调查以红素为主的海洋动物森林中的分层。 Crinoids是底栖悬挂式驱动的棘皮动物，自40年前最初对该想法的概念以来，它一直是海洋底栖社区分层的海报孩子。因此，它们是解决这个主题的理想群体。缺乏完整的crinoid化石的定量方法的开发在经典上受到了阻碍，这对于了解杯子骨骼元素的生长是必要的，杯子的骨骼元素的增长（容纳喂食的附加物和杯子的高度）。最近发现了来自英国威尔特郡的侏罗纪化石Crinoids的新的新型组合，该集合位于伦敦自然历史博物馆，为开发，测试和基准测试的完美自然实验室提供了一个统一的框架，以量化部分标本。一旦实现了这一目标，我们将应用新颖的框架来量化较旧的奥陶纪古社区中的分层和现代的Crinoid主导的海洋动物森林，以确保我们的方法的更广泛适用。我们的新分析工具将广泛适用于海洋底栖族社区，开辟了环境科学研究的新方向。