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      7000 years of turnover: historical contingency and human niche construction shape the Caribbean's Anthropocene biota

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          Abstract

          The human-mediated movement of species across biogeographic boundaries—whether intentional or accidental—is dramatically reshaping the modern world. Yet humans have been reshaping ecosystems and translocating species for millennia, and acknowledging the deeper roots of these phenomena is important for contextualizing present-day biodiversity loss, ecosystem functioning and management needs. Here, we present the first database of terrestrial vertebrate species introductions spanning the entire anthropogenic history of a system: the Caribbean. We employ this approximately 7000-year dataset to assess the roles of historical contingency and priority effects in shaping present-day community structure and conservation outcomes, finding that serial human colonization events contributed to habitat modifications and species extinctions that shaped the trajectories of subsequent species introductions by other human groups. We contextualized spatial and temporal patterns of species introductions within cultural practices and population histories of Indigenous, colonial and modern human societies, and show that the taxonomic and biogeographic diversity of introduced species reflects diversifying reasons for species introductions through time. Recognition of the complex social and economic structures across the 7000-year human history of the Caribbean provides the necessary context for interpreting the formation of an Anthropocene biota.

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          Above- and below-ground impacts of introduced predators in seabird-dominated island ecosystems.

          Predators often exert multi-trophic cascading effects in terrestrial ecosystems. However, how such predation may indirectly impact interactions between above- and below-ground biota is poorly understood, despite the functional importance of these interactions. Comparison of rat-free and rat-invaded offshore islands in New Zealand revealed that predation of seabirds by introduced rats reduced forest soil fertility by disrupting sea-to-land nutrient transport by seabirds, and that fertility reduction in turn led to wide-ranging cascading effects on belowground organisms and the ecosystem processes they drive. Our data further suggest that some effects on the belowground food web were attributable to changes in aboveground plant nutrients and biomass, which were themselves related to reduced soil disturbance and fertility on invaded islands. These results demonstrate that, by disrupting across-ecosystem nutrient subsidies, predators can indirectly induce strong shifts in both above- and below-ground biota via multiple pathways, and in doing so, act as major ecosystem drivers.
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            Island biogeography of the Anthropocene.

            For centuries, biogeographers have examined the factors that produce patterns of biodiversity across regions. The study of islands has proved particularly fruitful and has led to the theory that geographic area and isolation influence species colonization, extinction and speciation such that larger islands have more species and isolated islands have fewer species (that is, positive species-area and negative species-isolation relationships). However, experimental tests of this theory have been limited, owing to the difficulty in experimental manipulation of islands at the scales at which speciation and long-distance colonization are relevant. Here we have used the human-aided transport of exotic anole lizards among Caribbean islands as such a test at an appropriate scale. In accord with theory, as anole colonizations have increased, islands impoverished in native species have gained the most exotic species, the past influence of speciation on island biogeography has been obscured, and the species-area relationship has strengthened while the species-isolation relationship has weakened. Moreover, anole biogeography increasingly reflects anthropogenic rather than geographic processes. Unlike the island biogeography of the past that was determined by geographic area and isolation, in the Anthropocene--an epoch proposed for the present time interval--island biogeography is dominated by the economic isolation of human populations.
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              Human niche construction in interdisciplinary focus.

              Niche construction is an endogenous causal process in evolution, reciprocal to the causal process of natural selection. It works by adding ecological inheritance, comprising the inheritance of natural selection pressures previously modified by niche construction, to genetic inheritance in evolution. Human niche construction modifies selection pressures in environments in ways that affect both human evolution, and the evolution of other species. Human ecological inheritance is exceptionally potent because it includes the social transmission and inheritance of cultural knowledge, and material culture. Human genetic inheritance in combination with human cultural inheritance thus provides a basis for gene-culture coevolution, and multivariate dynamics in cultural evolution. Niche construction theory potentially integrates the biological and social aspects of the human sciences. We elaborate on these processes, and provide brief introductions to each of the papers published in this theme issue.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
                Proc. R. Soc. B.
                The Royal Society
                0962-8452
                1471-2954
                May 27 2020
                May 20 2020
                May 27 2020
                : 287
                : 1927
                : 20200447
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Integrative Biology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA
                [2 ]La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, 5801 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036, USA
                [3 ]Institute of Low Temperature Science, Hokkaido University, Kita-19 Nishi-8 Kita-ku, Sapporo 060-0819, Japan
                [4 ]Laboratories of Molecular Anthropology and Microbiome Research, 101 David L. Boren Blvd, Norman, OK 73019, USA
                [5 ]Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA
                Article
                10.1098/rspb.2020.0447
                7287370
                32429803
                82e136ec-58c5-4a08-8a11-8ed6d4af35e3
                © 2020

                https://royalsociety.org/-/media/journals/author/Licence-to-Publish-20062019-final.pdf

                https://royalsociety.org/journals/ethics-policies/data-sharing-mining/

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