Body mass-related changes in mammal community assembly patterns during the late Quaternary of North America

Authors

Silvia Pineda-Munoz, Indiana University - BloomingtonFollow
Advait M. Jukar, Smithsonian Inst., Washington, D.C.
Anikó B. Toth, Smithsonian Inst., Washington, D.C.
Danielle Fraser, Smithsonian Inst., Washington, D.C.
Andrew Du, Colorado State University - Fort Collins
W. Andrew Barr, Smithsonian Inst., Washington, D.C.
Kathryn L. Amatangelo, The College at Brockport, State Univ. of New York
Meghan A. Balk, University of Arizona
Anna K. Behrensmeyer, Smithsonian Inst., Washington, D.C.
Jessica Blois, University of California, Merced
Matt Davis, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Jussi T. Eronen, Universitty of Helsinki
Nicholas J. Gotelli, University of Vermont
Cindy Looy, University of California Berkeley
Joshua H. Miller, University of CincinnatiFollow
Alexandria B. Shupinski, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Laura C. Soul, Smithsonian Inst., Washington, D.C.
Amelia Villaseñor, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Scott Wing, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta
S. Kathleen Lyons, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow

ORCID IDs

Silvia Pineda-Munoz https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0597-4456

A. B. Tóth https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3063-1917

N. J. Gotelli https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5409-7456

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2021

Citation

Ecography 44:56-66, 2021

Comments

© 2020 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,

Abstract

The late Quaternary of North America was marked by prominent ecological changes, including the end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, the spread of human settlements and the rise of agriculture. Here we examine the mechanistic reasons for temporal changes in mammal species association and body size during this time period. Building upon the co-occurrence results from Lyons et al. (2016) – wherein each species pair was classified as spatially aggregated, segregated or random – we examined body mass differences (BMD) between each species pair for each association type and time period (Late Pleistocene: 40 000 ¹⁴C–11 700 ¹⁴C ybp, Holocene: 11 700 ¹⁴C–50 ybp and Modern: 50–0 yr). In the Late Pleistocene and Holocene, the BMD of both aggregated and segregated species pairs was significantly smaller than the BMD of random pairs. These results are consistent with environmental filtering and competition as important drivers of community structure in both time periods. Modern assemblages showed a breakdown between BMD and co-occurrence patterns: the average BMD of aggregated, segregated and random species pairs did not differ from each other. Collectively, these results indicate that the late Quaternary mammalian extinctions not only eliminated many large-bodied species but were followed by a re-organization of communities that altered patterns of species coexistence and associated differences in body size.