Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Linking Space, Time, and Elevation through Diet: Stable Isotope Analysis of Functionally Diverse Rodents in the Great Basin

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  • Ecology is focused on understanding how organisms interact with each other and their environments, across ecological, spatial, and temporal scales. Thus, understanding how processes and patterns of ecological systems change across space and time is a principle goal for conservation biologist globally. While many approaches exist for investigating the changing dynamics of natural systems, stable isotope analysis has emerged over the last two decades as a powerful tool for uniting spatial, temporal, and ecological scales, allowing study of modern, historical, and paleontological interactions among organisms, populations, and species, and between species and their environment. Here, we use stable isotope analysis to help unlock the wealth of ecological information contained in museum specimens. We then use 13C and 15N to move across scales in space and time to assess the role of competition in driving resource partitioning among two iconic small mammal competitors: pocket mice. Specifically, we ask how competitive interactions between species have changed in response to environmentally-driven shifts in cooccurrence patterns of these species along elevational gradients in the mountains of the Great Basin, western North America. Finally, we add 2H to our study to assess how to disentangle climate-driven signals recorded by 13C and 15N in mammal fur and plant foliage manifest across gradients in latitude, longitude, and elevation, and the degree to which the addition of this third isotopic tracer provides novel ecological insights into resource selection within plant and animal groups based on functional ecological traits. We find that museum specimens are an important resource for investigating ecological change, but that when preserved with formalin, specimens have an altered isotopic signal that can be modeled and corrected following basic principles of biochemical reactions. We then utilize historical and modern museum specimens collected as part of the Great Basin Resurvey Project to demonstrate that the degree of sympatry between competitive pocket mice plays an important role in driving resource partitioning, but little signal of any ghost of competition past determining modern resource selection. Finally, by tracing deuterium along elevational gradients in plant and mammal tissues historically and today, we demonstrated that climate change may be driving a shift in the strength of environmental signals captured by stable isotopes in plants and mammals, and that habitat aridity plays a critical role in determining the degree to which bionomic insights from carbon and nitrogen isotopes are confounded by environmental factors.
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  • Ongoing Research
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  • 2019-06-22 to 2021-07-22
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