Meeting Abstract
Biodiversity loss is recognized as a global crisis. Current research strives to quantify and predict the change in biodiversity throughout the world, focusing on a wide range of taxa. However, current predictive models of mammal diversity in the United States suffer from low precision. They are not scaled with adequate spatial or temporal resolution because richness has not been evaluated at a broad spatiotemporal scale. The prediction of changes in mammal diversity are important to land management and conservation efforts, and, without adequate information, the existing biodiversity in the United States may not be fully protected. Our research takes conservation paleobiology in a new direction by using paleobiological methods to analyze a high-resolution record of the changes in mammal diversity in the continental United States through the last 110 years. We collected mammal occurrence data from the online database VertNet and individual museum collections, divided it into ten year increments, and used scripts in ArcGIS 10.2 to produce sampling-standardized patterns of mammal diversity in each decade. We then analyzed the geographic distribution of diversity change over the 20th century. Mammal diversity in the last century increased in two regions: one northern section between 43° and 47° latitude and one southeastern strip from Texas to North Carolina. Diversity decreased throughout the rest of the United States. Our study describes regions in the United States that are experiencing the most severe biodiversity losses which suggests that those regions should be focal areas for conservation efforts. Further directions include testing hypotheses about the role of climate and human population change to influence these patterns of mammal diversity shifts.
