Structure, not Bias

Holland, Steven M.

doi:10.1017/jpa.2017.114

Cited by 13 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The quantification of overlapping chronostratigraphical units and their contemporary arrangement in spatial bins (e.g. latitudinal bins; Figs 2–3) is also helpful in investigating the spatial architecture behind the distribution of these formations, and the fossil record they subsequently provide (Holland 2017). For example, the rhythmic fluctuations in the extent of epeiric seas and the tectonic rearrangements in latitudinal belts of depositional environments can be contemporarily quantified and correlated with spatiotemporal variations in diversity, providing a new, refined tool to investigate the common cause hypothesis (Butler et al .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formation binning: a new method for increased temporal resolution in regional studies, applied to the Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossil record of North America

2020

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The advent of palaeontological occurrence databases has allowed for detailed reconstruction and analyses of species richness through deep time. While a substantial literature has evolved ensuring that taxa are fairly counted within and between different time periods, how time itself is divided has received less attention. Stage-level or equalinterval age bins have frequently been used for regional and global studies in vertebrate palaeontology. However, when assessing diversity at a regional scale, these resolutions can prove inappropriate with the available data. Herein, we propose a new method of binning geological time for regional studies that intrinsically incorporates the chronostratigraphic heterogeneity of different rock formations to generate unique stratigraphic bins. We use this method to investigate the diversity dynamics of dinosaurs from the Late Cretaceous of the Western Interior of North America prior to the Cretaceous-Palaeogene mass extinction.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formation binning: a new method for increased temporal resolution in regional studies, applied to the Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossil record of North America

2020

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“…Whereas the primary aim of this chapter was to quantify the impact of the Pull of the Recent, it also focuses on the raw data, which serves as an important primer, regardless of the analytical methods used to quantify biodiversity, to understand the structure of the fossil record. Rather than focusing and emphasizing bias, it is this structure that should be utilized to guide and frame our analyses (Holland 2017). The results discussed within this chapter, further corroborate the quality of the New Zealand shallow-marine fossil record (Cooper et al 2006, Crampton et al 2006a, Crampton et al 2006b, Foote et al 2007, Clowes et al 2020 and sets the scene for the subsequent chapters which focus on other structural attributes of the New Zealand fossil record (Chapter 6) and their interpretation (Chapters 7 and 8).…”

Section: Prefacesupporting

confidence: 60%

“…The Pull of the Recent revisitednegligible species-level effect in a regional marine fossil record "It is time for us to move on from bias and focus and structure." Holland, 2017)…”

Section: Chaptermentioning

confidence: 99%

Diversity dynamics of New Zealand's temperate shallow-marine ecosystems through the Cenozoic

Womack¹

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The fossil record provides the only evidence of how ecosystems have evolved over long timescales (multi-centennial to millennial) and how they have responded to changes in geological and environmental processes. Quantifying the impact of these geological and environmental processes on biodiversity is fundamental to understanding the paradigm of modern biodiversity loss and the ecological reverberations of anthropogenic climate change. Crucially, biodiversity is spatially dependent, and our perception of biodiversity may differ depending on the spatial scale of observation. As a result, understanding the diversity dynamics of the fossil record is both a question of time and space. Recent evidence suggests that studies at the regional spatial scale are optimal for understanding macroevolutionary and macroecological processes. Despite this, regional-scale studies using data from the fossil record are limited, particularly in the southern hemisphere. This thesis focuses on the temporal and spatial impacts of geological, climatic, and oceanographic processes on New Zealand’s regional shallow-marine molluscan ecosystems through the Cenozoic Era (the last 66 Myrs). New Zealand hosts remarkably complete Cenozoic stratigraphic and fossil records; the latter is regarded as the most complete shallow-marine fossil record in the southern hemisphere. As a result, this record provides an ideal case study to examine macroevolutionary and macroecological processes in the shallow marine realm at the regional scale. In addition, New Zealand’s modern and Cenozoic shallow-marine ecosystems are temperate. Temperate marine ecosystems are vastly understudied compared to their tropical counterparts in both modern ecosystems and the fossil record, and their response to climate change is poorly understood, particularly in the southern hemisphere. This thesis comprises four related research papers that form the main chapters. These are introduced by detailed background, data analysis, and methods chapters. The overarching aim of these papers is to: (1) quantify the impact of known confounding effects in the fossil record, particularly the Pull of the Recent; (2) evaluate the spatial dependence of biodiversity in the fossil record, particularly on temporal patterns of beta diversity; (3) understand the impact of climate change on taxonomic and functional biogeographic patterns of shallow-marine biodiversity; (4) employ the methods developed in the previous chapters to test the importance and role of several important geological and climatic factors on the spatial structuring New Zealand’s shallow-marine biodiversity. First, I find that the Pull of the Recent effects <2 % of genera and <4 % of species when considering taxa missing from the youngest ~5 Myrs of the New Zealand shallow-marine molluscan fossil record. Furthermore, the taxonomic composition of molluscs missing from the youngest part of the fossil record cannot easily be explained by effects related to shell mineralogical composition, body size, habitat, or taxonomic class. Lithification has minimal effect on the impact of the Pull of the Recent but does have a notable effect on apparent range-through diversity in the Pleistocene. Secondly, I show that beta diversity is spatially dependent at local to regional spatial scales and that uneven spatial sampling can influence recovered temporal trends in beta diversity. We argue that newly developed methods that allow for multisite beta diversity, partitioned into total dissimilarity, spatial turnover and nestedness, are the most suitable for elucidating patterns of beta diversity in the fossil record. Thirdly, I find that the interrelationship between two biogeographic patterns, the species-area relationship and functional diversity-area relationship, shows a strong, positive correlation to regional oceanic temperature, suggesting a long-lived and persistent association in the structuring of biodiversity, and temperature-dependence of functional redundancy, over the last ~45 Ma. Lastly, I find that oceanic warming seemingly has both a long-term positive effect on regional taxonomic diversity and rates of origination, but a negative correlation with regional functional diversity and its spatial distribution. This negative long-term relationship between regional functional diversity and oceanic temperature is likely driven by functional resilience to extinction during cool intervals rather than a negative response to warming per se. In summary, this thesis confirms the high quality of the New Zealand shallow-marine fossil record and identifies oceanic temperature as a major positive correlate of regional taxonomic diversity, origination, and functional redundancy. This correlation is not consistent across spatial scales, a reflection of other abiotic and biotic processes that are likely important. These findings are relevant to our understanding of macroevolutionary and macroecological processes, particularly how temperate shallow-marine ecosystems may respond to future warming. For New Zealand, this research suggests, as a baseline, that natural warming may increase equilibrium taxonomic diversity and functional redundancy in New Zealand. However, anthropogenic climate change is associated with increased loss of biodiversity and habitat destruction in the geological short term. This is likely to alter the future trajectory of New Zealand’s biodiversity anticipated from natural warming, which may have far-reaching impacts for the short- and long-term future of New Zealand’s unique and highly endemic marine fauna. Furthermore, the results discussed of this thesis also suggest the unfolding sixth mass extinction may be qualitatively different (i.e., higher levels of functional extinction) from previous mass extinction events and have correspondingly unforeseeable consequences. Lastly, and importantly, this thesis highlights the need for further study in shallow-marine temperate ecosystems, particularly at finer time scales, to better our understanding of diversity dynamics, and extinction risk.

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“…A matter of continuing debate is whether the correlation between biodiversity and preserved rock quantity is evidence for preservation bias that has distorted patterns in the fossil record or is instead a signal of geological processes exerting direct or indirect controls on the timing of biological evolution and physical environmental changes that affect the pattern of sedimentation (Newell, 1959). The latter is known as the "common-cause" hypothesis (Crampton et al, 2003;Peters, 2005;Peters and Heim, 2011a;Peters et al, 2013;Holland, 2017;Husson and Peters, 2018;Nawrot et al, 2018). The appearances and disappearances of Ediacaran-type macrofossils are subject to this same debate (Seilacher, 1984;Amthor et al, 2003;Johnston et al, 2012;Laflamme et al, 2013;Cohen and Macdonald, 2015;Darroch et al, 2015;Sperling et al, 2016;Bowyer et al, 2017;Darroch et al, 2018;Tarhan et al, 2018;Gehling et al, 2019), particularly…”

Section: The Shuram-wonoka Anomaly and Marine Transgressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Macrostratigraphy of the Ediacaran System in North America

Segessenman¹,

Peters²

2023

Preprint

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Ediacaran sediments record the termination of Cryogenian ‘Snowball Earth’ glaciations, preserve the first occurrences of macroscopic metazoans, and contain one of the largest known negative δ13C excursions (the Shuram-Wonoka). The rock record for the transition between the Proterozoic and Phanerozoic in North America is also physically distinct, with much of the continent characterized by a wide variety of mostly crystalline Proterozoic and Archean rocks overlain by early Paleozoic shallow marine sediments. Here, we present quantitative macrostratigraphic summaries of rock quantity and type using a new comprehensive compilation of Ediacaran geological successions in North America. In keeping with previous results that have identified early Paleozoic burial of the ‘Great Unconformity’ as a major transition in the rock record, we find that the Ediacaran System has greatly reduced areal extent and volume in comparison to the Cambrian and most younger Phanerozoic systems. The closest quantitative analogue to the Ediacaran System in North America is the Permian-Triassic interval, deposited during the culminating assembly and early rifting phases of the supercontinent Pangea. The Shuram-Wonoka carbon isotope excursion occurs against the backdrop of the largest increase in carbonate and total rock volume observed in the Ediacaran. The putatively global Gaskiers glaciation (~580-579 Ma), by contrast, has little quantitative expression in these data. Although the importance of Ediacaran time is often framed in the context of glaciation, biological evolution, and geochemical perturbations, the quantitative expressions of rock area, volume, and lithology in the geologic record clearly demarks the late Ediacaran to early Cambrian as the most dramatic transition in at least the past 635 Myr. The extent to which the timing and nature of this transition is reflected globally remains to be determined, but we hypothesize that the large expansion in the extent and volume of sedimentation within the Ediacaran, particularly among carbonates, and again from the Ediacaran to the Cambrian, documented here over approximately 17% of Earth’s present-day continental area, provides important insights into the drivers of biogeochemical and biological evolution at the dawn of animal life.

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Structure, not Bias

Cited by 13 publications

References 10 publications

Formation binning: a new method for increased temporal resolution in regional studies, applied to the Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossil record of North America

Formation binning: a new method for increased temporal resolution in regional studies, applied to the Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossil record of North America

Diversity dynamics of New Zealand's temperate shallow-marine ecosystems through the Cenozoic

Macrostratigraphy of the Ediacaran System in North America

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