Radical changes in the Earth’s biome have occurred over the past 30,000 years, with consequent changes in species ranges and connectivity. How can we best model species dynamics over thousands of years of ecological change? And what are the main environmental drivers underlying these dynamics? There is now a wealth of historic and prehistoric records documenting these processes, including pollen and fossil records, ancient genomes and sedimentary DNA, but a lack of tools limit the insights that can be derived from these records. Our ERC-funded research project - called Spatiotemporal Analytical Modelling for Paleobiology (STAMP) – will serve to link these disparate types of paleobiological records with the methodological tools of spatiotemporal process analysis. As proof of principle, we will analyze various types of paleobiological datasets from northern Eurasia and northwest North America. The postdoctoral fellow will work on one of the first work packages of this project, particularly focusing on megafauna range dynamics in the Arctic and taiga. The first year of the postdoctoral project will involve a period of co-supervision with Dr. Yucheng Wang (University of Cambridge) – an expert in sedimentary genomics. The first focus of the postdoctoral fellow job will involve computationally collecting and assembling a database of paleobiological records from select megafauna species of the Arctic and taiga.
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