Preadaptation to the anthropocene
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Human impacts, principally land-use change and habitat conversion, are radically changing the environment. While our collective footprint harms some species, it simultaneously benefits others. These beneficiaries are enigmatic, succeeding in what superficially appear to be evolutionarily novel habitats. However, many of the mechanisms by which species benefit from land-use change likely derive from preadaptations—anthropogenic habitats fortuitously match environmental conditions that the species evolved to exploit in natural habitats. But which characteristics preadapt species to land-use change, and what environmental gradients are relevant in filtering human-tolerant communities, are not well established. Using studies of organismal physiology, species distribution modeling, and standardized field surveys, I show that species' climatological niches predict their affinity towards human-made agricultural habitats across tropical amphibians, reptiles, and birds. Further, because species' responses are conserved phylogenetically, agricultural intensification erodes phylogenetic diversity faster than it undermines species diversity. By understanding the environmental gradients that determine community composition, rapid anthropogenic change becomes more predictable, and thus, its undesirable impacts may be minimized.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Frishkoff, Luke Owen |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Biology. |
| Primary advisor | Daily, Gretchen C |
| Thesis advisor | Daily, Gretchen C |
| Thesis advisor | Hadly, Elizabeth Anne, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | Fukami, Tadashi, 1972- |
| Advisor | Fukami, Tadashi, 1972- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Luke Owen Frishkoff. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Biology. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by Luke Owen Frishkoff
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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