Mapping zoological baselines through time in the Bear River Range: when archaeology meets wildlife science

This project seeks to understand cave deposits, game cameras, and live trapping, as measures of species diversity by comparing the paleozoological (cave deposits) and modern (camera and live-trapping) surveys. Additionally, this project utilizes a novel machine learning approach to study the importance of paleozoological data in understanding climate change and human development on ecosystems.

Mapping Zoological Baselines Through Time in the Bear River Range: When Archaeology Meets Wildlife Science Auriana Dunn, Kasey E. Cole, Austin Green, J. Tyler Faith, Randal Irmis University of Utah, Salt Lake City UT Background • • This project seeks to understand cave deposits, game cameras, and live trapping, as measures of species diversity by comparing the paleozoological (cave deposits) and modern (camera and live-trapping) surveys. Additionally, this project utilizes a novel machine learning approach to study the importance of paleozoological data in understanding climate change and human development on ecosystems. Results Discussion Fig 4. (Top left) Rarefaction and extrapolation of species richness for the modern data sets and paleontological data sets. Figure 5. (Bottom left) Total occurrences by dataset for all identified Orders. Figure 6. (Top right) Random Forest analysis of Variable Importance of the four target datasets. Figure 7. (Bottom right) Random Forest analysis of Variable Importance of the paleontological vs. contemporary datasets • Comparing the paleontological and modern data sets with rarefaction analysis shows that the paleontological data has a higher level of biodiversity than the modern data. This is due to the broader time frame that the caves cover, and the “equal opportunity” the cave deposits present for species to fall in and be preserved. • The Random Forest analysis shows that the larger contemporary data sets are more valuable when looking to train a predicting model on species richness. This project area is located on ancestral lands of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation and is part of assisting the Tribe in informing habitat restoration on nearby modern Indigenous land. Importance Methods • Incorporating palaeoecological data in ecosystem conservation and restoration projects is very important for understanding the full range of species diversity in a region. • With greater data collection, the paleontological data sets have the potential to be important in training machine-learning models. This project uses four datasets including: 1. Paleozoological remains from Thundershower and Boomerang Caves 2. Modern zoological survey data from game cameras 3. Live trapping zoological surveys from the Natural History Museum of Utah Two statistical analyses were conducted including: 1. Rarefaction analysis of species diversity with an iNEXT extrapolation 2. Random Forest analysis looking at the variable importance of the four datasets Acknowledgements Total Species-Level Identifications All data collected is from the study area, the Bear River Range (Figure 1). NSF #BCS-2308299 Citations Fig 1. Map of data collection points 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Fig 2. Example of camera trap data Fig 3. Example of cave specimen Cove, M. V., Kays, R., Bontrager, H., Bresnan, C., Lasky, M., Frerichs, T., ... & Jordan, M. J. (2021). SNAPSHOT USA 2019: a coordinated national camera trap survey of the United States. Damstedt, Jane; Cole, Kasey E. (2024, May 15). “Using Past Ecosystems to Understand Modern Climate Change: A Case Study from Utah’s House Mountain Range.” Wilkes Center For Climate Science and Policy Symposium poster session. Dietl, G. P., Kidwell, S. M., Brenner, M., Burney, D. A., Flessa, K. W., Jackson, S. T., & Koch, P. L. (2015). Conservation paleobiology: leveraging knowledge of the past to inform conservation and restoration. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 43(1), 79-103. Hsieh, T. C., Ma, K., & Chao, A. (2016). iNEXT: an R package for rarefaction and extrapolation of species diversity (H ill numbers). Methods in ecology and evolution, 7(12), 1451-1456. Kays, R., Cove, M. V., Diaz, J., Todd, K., Bresnan, C., Snider, M., ... & Morris, G. (2022). SNAPSHOT USA 2020: A second coordinated national camera trap survey of the United States during the COVID‐19 pandemic. O’Brien, K., Irmis, R. B., Brenner Coltrain, J., Dalmas, D. M., Derieg, K. M., Evans, T., ... & Faith, J. T. (2023). The utility of alpine cave fossil assemblages for zoological census: an example from northern Utah, United States. Journal of Mammalogy, 104(6), 1230-1245.