Quantifying ecological impacts of mass extinctions with network analysis of fossil communities.

ABSTRACT: Mass extinctions documented by the fossil record provide critical benchmarks for assessing changes through time in biodiversity and ecology. Efforts to compare biotic crises of the past and present, however, encounter difficulty because taxonomic and ecological changes are decoupled, and although various metrics exist for describing taxonomic turnover, no methods have yet been proposed to quantify the ecological impacts of extinction events. To address this issue, we apply a network-based approach to exploring the evolution of marine animal communities over the Phanerozoic Eon. Network analysis of fossil co-occurrence data enables us to identify nonrandom associations of interrelated paleocommunities. These associations, or evolutionary paleocommunities, dominated total diversity during su

SUBMITTER: Muscente AD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5960297 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature