The Falkland Islands Wolf: Investigating the origins of an extinct endemic canid
The Falkland Islands Wolf (Duscicyon australis), locally known as the Warrah, was the only terrestrial mammal native to the Falkland Islands when Europeans arrived in the seventeenth century. The lack of definitive evidence of a pre-European human presence, coupled with the expansive channel separating the islands from mainland South America, raises questions about how and when the extinct, endemic Warrah arrived in the islands. The goal of this study is to determine if there was a human presence in the Falkland Islands prior to European arrival and to assess the potential link between humans and the arrival time of the Warrah to the islands.
Extinction and invasion in the early Anthropocene: human impacts on high latitude ecosystems
The end-Pleistocene megafauna extinction remains one of the largest ecological perturbations since the end of the last ice age. While the cause of this extinction has been debated, there is growing consensus that environmental change and human impacts both contributed to the loss. Shortly after humans arrived in Alaska via the Bering land bridge ~14,000 BP, megafauna populations crashed. This occurred during widespread global changes associated with deglaciation, making it difficult to disentangle climate and human impacts. The bone fossil record provides a coarse understanding of the timing of extinction, but doesn’t provide detailed information about population fluctuations through time. In contrast, sediment cores preserve Sporormiella, a dung fungus whose life cycle is obligate to herbivory, providing sub-decadal reconstructions of megafuanal collapse. The goal of this project is to generate the first Sporormiella records in Alaska, a megafaunal hot spot and gateway for human colonization of the Americas, along with pollen and charcoal records from one of the earliest known sites of human habitation. Developing a precise timeline of megafauna population decline will allow for direct comparison with prehistoric fire, vegetation and archaeological records.