Lyons Paleoecology Lab Members | Lyons Paleoecology Lab

Kate Lyons, PhD

Principle Investigator

twitter: @realkatelyons

Current Projects

Welcome to the Lyons Paleoecology Lab!

Humans are profound ecosystem engineers, and our impacts on the world around us are altering the structure of ecological communities other than our own. These impacts are, in turn, leading to dramatic changes in the diversity and distribution of species. Understanding and predicting these effects is critical to maintaining the health of the global biosphere, given the potential loss of ecosystem services provided by many at risk species and groups of species. A crucial question in my lab is, therefore: how do we expect patterns of community assembly to be affected by future anthropogenic impacts and ongoing global change?

To answer this question, I focus on two, more fundamental, questions: 1) what are the patterns and causal processes of community assembly over time and space and in response to environmental perturbations? And, 2) How and when are those patterns and processes altered by human ecosystem engineering behavior and anthropogenic climate change? Ultimately, I’m interested in understanding whether the effects of humans are more like those of other planetary scale ecosystem engineers, mass extinction events, or whether humans are something entirely new in the history of life.

To address these questions, I combine data from the fossil record with modern studies. The fossil record provides a unique perspective by allowing the study of how communities change on time scales not possible using modern data. By examining changes in community structure in both deep and shallow time, we can quantify the effects of major environmental perturbations and new ecosystem engineering behaviors with and without humans in the system to disentangle the effects of human impacts from environmental perturbations of varying strength.

Current Lab Members

Matthew Craffey

PhD Candidate

I’m currently studying Ediacaran and early Cambrian paleocommunities to identify how community structure and evolutionary trends responded to intervals of biotic turnover, evolutionary innovation, and environmental change. My interests include the development of the first metazoan ecosystems, which may be able to provide more insight into fundamental processes of macroecology and evolution, as well as the effect of ecosystem engineers on community structure and diversification. I am also interested in human impacts on macroecological and macroevolutionary processes and how these impacts compare to past events of ecological disruption and faunal turnover across metazoan evolution. I am also broadly interested of the role of feedback processes in the evolution of novelty.

Email:mcraffey2@huskers.unl.edu

Maya Elliott

Masters Student

Email:melliott29@huskers.unl.edu

Jeremy McMullin

Masters student

Email:jmcmullin2@unl.edu

Alora Schneider

Undergraduate Student

Email:aschneider31@huskers.unl.edu

Former Lab Members

Alex Shupinski, PhD

Former E6 Postdoctoral Fellow and PhD Student

My current research interests involve using functional diversity to analyze temporal and spatial mammalian paleocommunity structure and identifying environmental factors that cause change.

Current Affiliation: Postdoctoral Fellow - University of South Dakota

email:abshupinski@gmail.com

Will Gearty, PhD

Former POE postdoctoral Fellow

I integrate paleontological and neontological tools to investigate the evolution of various biological systems through time and test hypotheses regarding the constraints and drivers of that evolution. My postdoctoral research focuses on the constraints and drivers of body size variation of terrestrial mammals at community and global scales.

Current Affiliation: American Museum of Natural History

Email:will.gearty@gmail.com

Website

Quentin Smith, Jr.

Former Masters student

My current research interests involve understanding fossil food web networks, and how size-biased extinction and climate change affects network properties.

Current Affliation: Polly Lab, Indiana University

Email:qsmith3@huskers.unl.edu

Catalina Tomé, PhD

Former Postdoctoral Fellow

I am interested in how mammal species and communities respond to the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss over the Quaternary. In particular, my current research focuses on changes in species morphology (body mass), resource use (diet) and associations within the community (potential species interactions) as response to the megafaunal extinction of the late Pleistocene and climatic shifts of the Holocene. Moreover, I am interested in comparing differences in species and community responses across different habitats as well as across time.

Current Affiliation: Curator of Mammals, Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites

Email:ctome@indianamuseum.org