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Evaluating the accuracy of biodiversity changes through geologic times: from simulation to solution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2017

Corentin Gibert  and
Gilles Escarguel
Corentin Gibert
Affiliation:
Université de Lyon, Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon, UMR 5276 CNRS, Université Lyon 1, ENS de Lyon, 2 rue Raphaël Dubois, 69622 Villeurbanne Cedex, France, and Laboratoire d’Ecologie des Hydrosystèmes Naturels et Anthropisés, UMR 5023 CNRS, Université Lyon 1, ENTPE, 6 rue Raphaël Dubois, 69622 Villeurbanne, France. E-mail: corentin.gibert@gmail.com, corentin.gibert@univ-lyon1.fr
Gilles Escarguel
Affiliation:
Université de Lyon, Laboratoire d’Ecologie des Hydrosystèmes Naturels et Anthropisés, UMR 5023 CNRS, Université Lyon 1, ENTPE, 6 rue Raphaël Dubois, 69622 Villeurbanne, France. E-mail: gilles.escarguel@univ-lyon1.fr
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Abstract

Estimating biodiversity and its variations through geologic time is a notoriously difficult task, due to several taphonomic and methodological effects that make the reconstructed signal potentially distinct from the unknown, original one. Through a simulation approach, we examine the effect of a major, surprisingly still understudied, source of potential disturbance: the effect of time discretization through biochronological construction, which generates spurious coexistences of taxa within discrete time intervals (i.e., biozones), and thus potentially makes continuous- and discrete-time biodiversity curves very different. Focusing on the taxonomic-richness dimension of biodiversity (including estimates of origination and extinction rates), our approach relies on generation of random continuous-time richness curves, which are then time-discretized to estimate the noise generated by this manipulation. A broad spectrum of data-set parameters (including average taxon longevity and biozone duration, total number of taxa, and simulated time interval) is evaluated through sensitivity analysis. We show that the deteriorating effect of time discretization on the richness signal depends highly on such parameters, most particularly on average biozone duration and taxonomic longevity because of their direct relationship with the number of false coexistences generated by time discretization. With several worst-case but realistic parameter combinations (e.g., when relatively short-lived taxa are analyzed in a long-ranging biozone framework), the original and time-discretized richness curves can ultimately show a very weak to zero correlation, making these two time series independent. Based on these simulation results, we propose a simple algorithm allowing the back-transformation of a discrete-time taxonomic-richness data set, as customarily constructed by paleontologists, into a continuous-time data set. We show that the reconstructed richness curve obtained this way fits the original signal much more closely, even when the parameter combination of the original data set is particularly adverse to an effective time-discretized reconstruction.

Type
Methods in Paleobiology
Information
Paleobiology , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , November 2017 , pp. 667 - 692
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Paleontological Society. All rights reserved 

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References

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