Potential Research Projects

A host of questions with considerable scientific and policy interest are amenable to study by student investigators:

• What was the nature and pace of environmental change through time, and how did organisms respond to it?
• How did community structure change over time (abundance, diversity, trophic/guild structure)?
• Is there a decoupling between diversity and other ecological parameters?
• How did particular ecological interactions vary temporally?
• How adaptively flexible are species in the face of environmental change under natural conditions?
• What are the circumstances that promote adaptive response to environmental perturbation?
• What types of organisms are most likely to survive perturbations?
• How quickly can systems respond to change?
• Are some habitats more prone to recovery than others?
• How have human activities (overfishing, habitat modification, pollution) impacted community structure?
• What is the range of variability in ecological systems before human impacts on the environment?
• How did ecosystems function in the absence of human influence?
• Which aspects of present day ecosystems are legacies (persistent effects) of past societal activity?
• What are the implications of this work for ecosystem management?

The answers to all of these questions require geohistorical information from time intervals before scientific monitoring efforts, which extend for the most part back only to the late 19th century.