Felisa Smith
University of New Mexico, NM·Ecology & Evolution
Large mammals are disappearing worldwide, and their roles in ecosystems are not taken over by smaller animals. The effects of such losses can take decades to centuries to appear, which is too slow to watch directly today.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Biology
- Topics
megafauna extinction
late Pleistocene
Quaternary
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Characterize changes in mammal morphology and ecological interactions across eight time intervals, using 2D and 3D imaging alongside community modeling and simulations.
- Determine whether mammal communities recovered after the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, and whether climate change or expanding late Holocene human impacts influenced the recovery.
More about the research
A natural experiment from the past helps: about 13,000 years ago, after humans arrived in the Americas, more than 150 species of the largest mammals went extinct, including mammoths, horses, camels, giant ground sloths and saber-toothed cats. Studying what followed offers baseline information on what future biodiversity loss could mean.
Why it matters
Large-bodied mammals are declining fast today. Knowing how ancient ecosystems changed and recovered after the loss of their megafauna could give conservation biologists and wildlife managers baseline information on what to expect from current biodiversity loss. The fossil identification and accessioning work also adds to museum collections available to other scientists.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alexandra Greenwald
University of Utah, UT·Social Science
Reconstruct the mobility and residential histories of 41 ancestors from a 12,000-9,000-year-old Bay Area mortuary site using strontium isotope analysis of tooth enamel, which records the geology of where a person lived as the enamel formed.
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.
John Kingston
University of Michigan, MI·Earth & Environmental Science
Reconstruct the environments surrounding the ape–hominin divergence through systematic analysis of fossil vertebrate collections together with phytolith, pollen and n-alkane plant records.
The school
University of New Mexico: 27 labs on PI Pages, $355M a year on research, 182 research doctorates a year.
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