Peter Siver
Connecticut College, CT·Ecology & Evolution
Fossils record how life responded to past climate swings such as warming events, ice ages, and shifts between wet and dry periods. That history offers clues to how ecosystems may respond to future change.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Biology
- Topics
microfossils
protists
silica
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Document new species, physical traits and past environmental conditions for each silica-bearing freshwater protist group in an 82-million-year North American fossil collection, using scanning electron microscopy data.
- Compare diversity, distribution, ecology and form across protist groups, and assess their capacity to migrate under different climate scenarios and their value as bioindicators.
- Estimate evolutionary change and minimum age constraints from the fossils for use in molecular phylogenetic studies, and publish digitized catalogs by group and site.
More about the research
Most fossils, though, are plants and animals. Microscopic protists, single-celled organisms that hold much of Earth's diversity, have very few fossil records, which limits their use in studying environmental change.
Why it matters
A synthesized record of how freshwater microbes changed through 82 million years of climate shifts could help scientists model how future environmental change will affect freshwater ecosystems. The work could also improve the use of these microbes as bioindicators and provide fossil dates for DNA-based evolutionary studies. Archiving the collection keeps it available to future researchers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sarah Sheffield
Binghamton University, NY·Ecology & Evolution
Test how ancient climate events affected heterochrony, meaning shifts in developmental timing, in Paleozoic echinoderms, using phylogenetic trees built from museum, database and literature data.
Brittany Hupp
George Mason University, VA·Earth & Environmental Science
Build records of single-shell foraminifera chemistry and shape across the onset of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) at IODP Site U1580, where shells were not dissolved by ocean acidification.
Peter Wilf
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Ecology & Evolution
Build the Virtual Paleobotany Assistant, deep learning software trained on image databases of extant and fossil leaves, to assign individual leaf fossils to plant families and orders.
The school
Connecticut College: 1 labs on PI Pages.
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