Download or read book Utilizing Vertebrates to Understand the Factors that Influence Terrestrial Ecosystem Structure written by Cory Redman and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conserving biodiversity in the current global ecological crisis requires a robust understanding of a multitude of abiotic and biotic processes operating at spatial and temporal scales that are nearly impossible to study on a human timescale and are therefore poorly understood. However, fossil data preserve a vast archive of information on past ecosystems and how they have changed through time. My PhD research is composed of three studies that look at biogeogaphic distribution, ecosystem structure, and trends in richness and diversity. Identifying organisms to the species level is a common practice in ecology when conducting community analyses. However, when species-level identification is not feasible, higher level taxonomic identifications are used as surrogates. This study tests the validity of supraspecific identifications for vertebrates in regional biogeography studies, using the recorded occurrences of terrestrial and aquatic taxa from 16 national parks on the Colorado Plateau and culling the data set based on a series of taphonomic processes to generated fossil assemblages. Changes in community structure as a result of increased magnitude and/or frequency of perturbations have been well documented in terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Unfortunately, the long-term effects of sea-level rise on vertebrate communities in coastal habitats are poorly understood and difficult to study on a human time scale. This study examines the long term effects of relative sea-level change on coastal plain ecosystems of the Belly River Group (Campanian) in southern Alberta using microvertebrate fossils. Most Cretaceous freshwater deposits in North America produce only a couple of articulated fish skeletons. Because of this preservational bias many workers suggested that freshwater teleosts were largely absent from North America until the Eocene or later. Late Cretaceous fish assemblages are of particular interest, because these assemblages undergo a major compositional change. Pre-Cretaceous fish assemblages are dominated by non-teleosts, while Paleogene assemblages are dominated by teleosts that are members of extant families. This study provides a first approach in characterizing long-term trends in richness and the distribution of Late Cretaceous, nonmarine actinopterygians of the Western Interior of North America.