Angélica González
Rutgers University-Camden, NJ·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Climate change is shifting rainfall and temperature worldwide. Most studies look at how single species respond over short periods.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
climate change
arthropods
biodiversity
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Compare soil arthropod diversity in fossil and modern rodent middens from Chile's Atacama Desert to reveal how communities vary across time and space over the past 50,000 years.
- Test the mechanisms by which soil arthropod communities respond to changes in precipitation, combining midden remains with isotope geochemistry, chemical signatures that record past environmental conditions.
- Measure the size and direction of biases in the midden fossil record, and build a toolbox of protocols and metrics that addresses gaps in time, mixing, and decay of remains after burial.
- Use past and present community-environment relationships to predict how future rainfall change will affect soil communities in arid lands.
More about the research
Far less is known about how whole communities change over thousands of years. This project uses an unusual natural archive to study that question in soil arthropods (insects, mites and their relatives) in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where rainfall is the main force shaping life.
Why it matters
Linking past and present responses of desert soil communities to rainfall could help predict how arid-land biodiversity will change under future climate change. The midden toolbox could also help other researchers reconstruct past ecosystems, for example in the Sonoran Desert. This could improve forecasts of how complex ecological systems respond to shifting climate.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Morgan Ernest
University of Florida, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Assess how novel conditions, including a warmer, drier climate and experimentally created species combinations, affect the ability to forecast mammal population sizes at the long-term Portal Project site in Arizona.
Felisa Smith
University of New Mexico, NM·Ecology & Evolution
Reconstruct diets of extinct and surviving mammals on Texas's Edwards Plateau over the past 20,000 years, using stable isotope analysis of collagen preserved in fossil bones.
Peter Siver
Connecticut College, CT·Ecology & Evolution
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.
The school
Rutgers University-Camden: 1 labs on PI Pages, $10M a year on research, 29 research doctorates a year.
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