Publication Date:
2015-10-03
Description:
The fossil record contains exemplars of extreme biodiversity crises. Here, we examined the stability of terrestrial paleocommunities from South Africa during Earth's most severe mass extinction, the Permian-Triassic. We show that stability depended critically on functional diversity and patterns of guild interaction, regardless of species richness. Paleocommunities exhibited less transient instability-relative to model communities with alternative community organization-and significantly greater probabilities of being locally stable during the mass extinction. Functional patterns that have evolved during an ecosystem's history support significantly more stable communities than hypothetical alternatives.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Roopnarine, Peter D -- Angielczyk, Kenneth D -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Oct 2;350(6256):90-3. doi: 10.1126/science.aab1371.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Institute for Biodiversity Science and Sustainability, California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118, USA. proopnarine@calacademy.org. ; Integrative Research Center, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL 60605, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26430120" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
*Biodiversity
;
*Extinction, Biological
;
*Fossils
;
Models, Statistical
;
Paleontology
;
Poisson Distribution
;
South Africa
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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