MAKING THE MOST OF THE LATE QUATERNARY PALEOECOLOGY OF THE SOUTHEAST

The southeastern U.S. is a critical region for understanding how ecosystems shift in response to climate change. This area contains some of the richest centers of biodiversity in North America and is predicted to be a critical region for species movement in response to climate change. In other regions of the country we have used the late Quaternary paleontological record to successfully gain a better understanding of major ecological transitions. At Samwell Cave, we have examined what happens to the relative abundances of microfauna communities across the end-Pleistocene extinctions. At Natural Trap Cave, my colleagues are examining what happens to megafaunal variation leading up to their extinctions, while I am exploring whether microfauna experience ecological release across as those megafauna go extinct. These studies and others all indicate that interspecific interactions reach across trophic levels and size categories to create large-scale, detectible ecological effects that we can use as indicators of major ecological shifts today.

The Appalachians contain thousands of caves, many of which contain a rich record of community and climate dynamics from the last 50,000 years. However, we have not yet fully utilized these rich resources to leverage an understanding of community dynamics through time. We need to mobilize our resources to work out a detailed understanding of how species and ecosystems have shifted on the landscape throughout the late Pleistocene and into the Holocene so that we can have a better understanding of modern dynamics. Here, I will present a summary of what has been done so far, and where gaps exist in our data and knowledge of paleoecology in the Southeast.