communities interact with their environments. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are using a novel methodology to investigate how mammals' ability to function in their environments has been threatened in the past, and what challenges they can expect to face in the future.
The data showed that mammal biodiversity in eastern Africa began to decline around 5 million years ago. It also revealed that aspects of biodiversity decline happened at multiple points, and that extinctions coincided with"We wondered what we would find if we investigated how the mammals' physical traits changed as their environments changed over time, rather than just looking at patterns in their biodiversity," Lauer said.
Each of these traits exhibits a relationship based on the degree to which an environment is dominated by grasses versus woody plants. For example, if a species has a taller tooth, it can more durably consume the abrasive grassy vegetation of grasslands. With a shorter tooth, a species is instead suited to consume softer, woody vegetation, like shrubs.
Their analysis demonstrated that earlier biodiversity losses were a result of species adapting to grassland environments or tracking their preferred environments across geographies. In short, those biodiversity losses didn't necessarily have any sort of negative impact on the ability of mammal communities to function properly in their environments.