Palaeogenetics · Looking to the past to predict the future: the evolution of biodiversity through climate change and the rise of human society
FP7 — People (Marie Curie Actions)
- Duration
- 2013-12-01 → 2016-11-29
- EU contribution
- €241,042
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MC-IIF
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Results in brief
Looking to the past to predict the future: the evolution of biodiversity through climate change and the rise of human society
The goal of the project was to develop a software that used approximate Bayesian computation to combine species distribution models and ancient DNA data for 6 species of mammals. This analysis was to be used to understand the affect of climate change and human society on mammalian population dynamics. Although Dr. Chan was unable to complete this aspect of the project, she did develop a novel analysis using approximate Bayesian computation to examine community response to climatic change, entitled “Detecting concerted demographic response across community assemblages using hierarchical approximate Bayesian computation”, this was published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, June 2014. This novel analysis and software uses genetic data to understand community response to past climatic and environmental change in communities as diverse as coral reef and temperate post-glacial communities.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Biodiversity loss and climate change are the most critical environmental threats today. In order to predict future changes and develop conservation strategies, we must understand the evolutionary and ecological processes underlying species response to global change. This project will improve our predictions of the future by looking to the past, using ancient DNA technology to track genetic change of six taxa with varying levels of human impact, habitat specialization, and sensitivity to climate over the last 45,000 years. Ancient DNA will be integrated with ecological-niche models in a novel statistical framework, enabling for the first time quantitative model evaluation, an understanding of the underlying climatic and human factors influencing species response, and improvement of future predictions. This project brings Dr. Chan’s analytical expertise developed in the US to Dr. Dalen’s ancient DNA datasets and ecological models, to advance European research excellence in addressing climate change and biodiversity loss.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- NATURHISTORISKA RIKSMUSEET · StockholmCoordinatorSweden
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union