Ghosts of yellowstone: multi-decadal histories of wildlife populations captured by bones on a modern landscape.

ABSTRACT: Natural accumulations of skeletal material (death assemblages) have the potential to provide historical data on species diversity and population structure for regions lacking decades of wildlife monitoring, thereby contributing valuable baseline data for conservation and management strategies. Previous studies of the ecological and temporal resolutions of death assemblages from terrestrial large-mammal communities, however, have largely focused on broad patterns of community composition in tropical settings. Here, I expand the environmental sampling of large-mammal death assemblages into a temperate biome and explore more demanding assessments of ecological fidelity by testing their capacity to record past population fluctuations of individual species in the well-studied ungulate community

SUBMITTER: Miller JH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3065453 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature