Servicenavigation

Project Details

Back

Projekt Print View

Unraveling drivers of species diversification – an integrative deep-time approach on continental aquatic biota

Subject Area Palaeontology
Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
Term from 2018 to 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413652595
 
Final Report Year 2023

Final Report Abstract

Understanding the drivers of species diversification is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and palaeontology. Over the past decades, numerous papers have approached this topic from different angles, applying different methods (fossils vs. molecular data) on various species groups and geographic and stratigraphic frames. Common to all approaches was so far a fixed time frame, where a uniform impact of abiotic and/or biotic factors is assumed over long geological time frames. However, this assumption contrasts massive fluctuations in environmental settings over extended temporal scales and may severely impede realistic reconstructions of the forces driving the origination and extinction of species. In this project, we introduced a novel framework to approach exactly this problem using the fossil record of freshwater gastropods from Europe and North America over the past 100 million years. Our new concept is based on dissecting a long timeframe and assessing abiotic/biotic drivers for multiple shorter windows instead. Our estimates proved superior to those based on the commonly used long-term approach. In addition to our methodological advance, we assessed species diversification and its driving forces from a multitude of different perspectives: i) We studied the impact of the (previously underestimated) impact of the 5th mass extinction, as well as projected extinction rates and magnitude for the current biodiversity crisis, evidencing the dramatic biodiversity decline we are facing; ii) we modelled the extinction risk of European freshwater gastropods with respect to species ecology, based on a comparison of fossil and recent data, finding a strong link between extinction probability and colonization ability as a function of ecological traits; iii) using our new window-approach, we investigated the onset of diversification in European freshwater gastropods in the Cretaceous, finding strong support for a link to sea-level fluctuation as well as major biotic and climatic events; iv) we assessed patterns and processes of diversification in North American freshwater gastropods, showing a strong association to short-term climatic events and long-term changes in the continent's palaeogeographic configuration. These major project results are supplemented by a number of smaller papers including taxonomic studies on selected faunas or taxa that aimed to enhance the primary data quality.

Publications

 
 

Additional Information

© 2025 DFG Disclaimer / Copyright / Privacy Policy

Textvergrößerung und Kontrastanpassung