Using Capture Mark Recapture to Assess the Effects of Climate Change on Marine Invertebrate Evolutionary Patterns

• Activity Number: 602
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): John Handley*+ and Jocelyn A Sessa
• Companies: Paleontological Research Institution and American Museum of Natural History

Abstract

Climate change has long been considered a driver of marine invertebrate species extinction, origination, and compositional turnover, yet the nature of these relationships remains unclear. We examine fossil mollusk assemblages from the late Cretaceous (65.5 million years ago (Mya)) through the Oligocene (29 Mya) to determine whether and how climate affects their extinction and origination.

We use the Praedel capture mark recapture (CMR) model, interpreted for paleoecological data, to analyze effects of temperature change on origination and extinction rates of these taxa. Sampling issues typically plague paleoecological data - the amount of outcrop area where fossils can be collected varies through time and age constraints are often poor. The CMR model accounts for unequal time bin duration and unequal observation probabilities owing to: variable sampling intensity, preservation, and geographic spread of fossiliferous outcrops. These effects are captured through logistic regression on observation probabilities. Covariates of temperature means, minima, maxima and range (estimated by stable isotope proxies) are regressed on origination and extinction probabilities.