Developing methods to reconstruct population and ecosystem trajectories to predict future responses to climate change

Funding period: 2020-2024
Lead: Greg Robertson
Total GRDI funding: $83,343

A key challenge to predicting responses of biota to climate change is the lack of direct observations over a range of climatic conditions. One solution is to reconstruct the populations or ecosystems of interest over a longer time span using paleoenvironmental approaches, producing a time series of over a broader range of climatic conditions. However, a constraint with most paleoenvironmental approaches is the lack of a species-specific signal. Extracellular environmental (eDNA), and specifically paleo-eDNA provides a method to assign proxies to specific species, enhancing reconstructions of their populations and evaluating their responses to previous climate shifts. This work is meant to inform the planning of protected areas by identifying coastal areas of past important biological value, which may be important again as climate shifts lead to a re-distribution of biodiversity.