planktonic forams & marine micropaleoecology

Forams have the best species-level fossil record available to science. Their species-level resolution in the Cenozoic (last 66 Ma) is greater than the genus-level data of any macrofossil group for the entire Phanerozoic (last ~540 Ma). Moreover, their calcitic shells preserve life history and ecology, enabling quantification of functional traits (and groups) at a resolution unachievable for most other organisms. Groups, such as forams, with consistent ecological and morphological traits across a clade’s history, afford different perspectives on biodiversity dynamics than do species and genera, which are evolutionarily ephemeral. 

My lab leverages these characteristics, while developing and applying cutting edge quantitative tools, to answer important eco-evolutionary questions about global change, community dynamics and environmental adaptation across the Cenozoic. We focus on finding events that are both regional and global in nature and have important impacts on the functional ecology of forams (especially extinctions, hyperthermal events and ocean circulation changes). Currently we are also constructing large databases to fill in major spatiotemporal gaps.

To understand ocean ecosystems from a longer temporal perspective, we need data beyond forams, and performing such assessments through the macro-fossil record is difficult due to the small quantity of global data available beyond the last few million years. To overcome this, My lab hhas been collaborating with a network of experts who work on major marine groups across multiple trophic levels and ecological roles (diatoms, radiolarians, sharks, etc.). We will synthesize large spatiotemporally resolved micropaleontological and biogeochemical datasets to explore the drivers of long-term marine ecological dynamics, specifically in the Late Cenozoic, and better quantify how these archives can inform models of current and future marine ecosystem services as well as the efforts to conserve them in the coming years.