Project description
Uncovering what led to the extinction of large animals when humans arrived
Ecosystem destruction usually brings about fragmentation – the division of habitats into smaller and more isolated areas. Consequently, large mammal populations are collapsing. What caused megafauna, i.e. large animals, to go extinct over the last 50 000 years remains hotly debated. Another unanswered question is how humans and the climate helped to transform and collapse megafaunal ecosystems, and how this affected human societies at various periods. The EU-funded ISLANDLAB project will address these questions using the Maltese Islands to explore the effects of anthropogenic ecosystem fragmentation. It will create high-resolution ecological, climatic and archaeological characterisations of Malta before and after humans arrived and the ensuing change of living organisms.
Objective
Humans are fragmenting ecosystems into habitat 'islands', causing an unprecedented global collapse of large mammal populations just as science is discovering their essential ecological roles. The impact of these losses is such that our understanding of the contemporary biosphere is clearly shaped by a world artificially depleted of terrestrial giants. However, the causes of megafaunal extinctions over a much deeper, >50,000-year timeframe remain strongly contested. How did specific anthropogenic and/or climate factors interact to transform and collapse megafaunal ecosystems and what implications did this have for human societies at different points in time? The feedbacks and ecological legacies of these older extinctions have important lessons for the current biodiversity crisis, yet the dearth of good quality fossil and contextual data from many regions, settings and species has prevented robust appraisal. ISLANDLAB will explore these questions using the Maltese Islands as a frame of reference for the effects of anthropogenic ecosystem fragmentation. Pilot work has already uncovered an unprecedented deep-time record of pristine natural systems successively interrupted by waves of humans. Direct interaction between humans and the endemic megafauna begins with a likely Neanderthal presence and ends with the first monumental civilizations, with exponential losses and subsequent faunal reintroductions lasting until the mid-Holocene. By building high-resolution ecological, climatic, and archaeological characterisations of Malta before and after human arrival and subsequent alteration of biotas, ISLANDLAB will therefore document long-term legacies and feedbacks between ecological changes, societal responses, and ecosystem resilience. More broadly, the results will shed light on extinction processes in current anthropogenic landscapes, elucidating the ecological and human dimensions of restoration pathways from an island paradigm at a pivot between Europe and Africa.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history prehistory
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences atmospheric sciences meteorology biosphera
- natural sciences biological sciences ecology ecosystems
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2021-STG
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80539 MUNCHEN
Germany
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