This $351,499 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) supports research to quantify the ecological legacy of the Terminal Pleistocene megafaunal extinction on mammal communities in the Edward's Plateau region of Texas. The research team at the University of Nebraska will characterize changes in diet, morphology, and ecological interactions of extinct and surviving mammals over the past 20,000 years through stable isotope analysis, 2D/3D...
This $457,737 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) supports collaborative research at the California Academy of Sciences to model marine paleocommunity dynamics across the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, approximately 251 million years ago. The research aims to advance understanding of ecosystem functioning and energy flow by reconstructing ancient marine food webs and testing the uniformitarian assumptions underlying...
This Project Grant award of $130,076.00 from the National Science Foundation's Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) will support collaborative research to model the dynamics of marine paleocommunities across the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, approximately 251 million years ago. The project aims to examine how ancient ecosystems adapted to extreme disturbances by using fossil records and advanced computational analyses. This research addresses the fundamental challenge of reconstructing...
This $419,234 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) supports research to study the effects of climate change on mammalian functional diversity over long timescales. Key objectives include: Analyzing changes in mammal functional diversity, floral composition, and abiotic factors like temperature before, during, and after the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) climate event in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming. This will elucidate the...
This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, under the Geosciences program (CFDA 47.050), will support a collaborative research project to examine how terrestrial ecosystems were rebuilt following the Cretaceous/Paleogene mass extinction event approximately 66 million years ago. The $234,197 award, with a project period from September 1, 2023 to August 31, 2028, will fund paleontological and geochemical analyses of fossil collections and new field...
This Project Grant award of $152,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (CFDA 47.075) program supports collaborative paleontological and geological research to advance understanding of hominoid and hominin evolution. The project will recover fossil, paleoenvironmental, and geological data from 6-million-year-old sites relevant for understanding human origins. Key activities include intensive paleontological recovery, paleoenvironmental...
This $372,195 federal Project Grant, awarded by the National Science Foundation's Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050), supports a collaborative research project to study the effects of climate change on mammalian functional diversity using a high-resolution fossil record and novel AI workflows. The key products and services to be delivered under this 3-year award, which began on November 1, 2024, include: Generating 3D datasets from micro-CT scans of mammalian fossils to characterize functional...
This $116,693 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Geosciences program (CFDA 47.050) supports collaborative research to illuminate fundamental climate processes that influenced terrestrial ecology in western Pangea during Earth's previous icehouse period. Key goals combine paleontology, isotope geochemistry, and magnetostratigraphy to: identify the stratigraphic position of the Carboniferous-Permian boundary in Utah's Cutler Group sedimentary rocks; determine the pace and...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $279,943 Project Grant to the University of Oregon to conduct collaborative research on the evolution of North American small mammal communities in response to landscape changes from the Oligocene to Miocene epochs (30 to 5 million years ago). The project aims to understand the relationship between vegetation and mammalian communities, with a focus on how small mammals respond to habitat changes over time. The research will integrate fieldwork to...
The National Science Foundation awarded a $291,498 Project Grant to the University of Oregon under the Geosciences program (CFDA 47.050) to examine the ecological and environmental changes that occurred on land across the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/PG) boundary in the Rocky Mountain region. The research will involve extensive paleontological and geochemical analyses of existing fossil collections and new field data to reveal the variability in the timing and pattern of terrestrial ecosystem...