The outputs of the BioSIGNAL project, after 2.5 years, go well beyond the state of the art. The modeling workflows that we developed, permitting to quantify the feedbacks between marine Life and the environment (Stockey, Pohl et al., PNAS 2021; Zacaï, Monnet, Pohl et al., Science Advances 2021) constitute a major step forward toward the mechanistic understanding of the co-evolution of Life and the physical environment through geological time. But of course, the robust understanding of such co-evolution largely relies on our capacity to reconstruct environmental changes in the deep time. To that purpose, we developed a dedicated workflow permitting to assimilate sparse geological data in a spatially-resolved, 3-dimensional numerical framework offering a coupled representation of climate and the biosphere. This workflow permitted to shed new light on the ocean oxygenation changes during the latest Ordovician mass extinction (Pohl et al., Nature Geoscience 2021) and on the geological record of ocean oxygenation over the last 550 million years (Pohl et al., revised for Nature). We are firmly convinced that such method, by permitting to reconcile data bearing conflicting signals into a physically consistent numerical framework, will pave the way for future work and should become a standard procedure.
We are now improving our understanding of the co-evolution of marine Life and the physical environment during key geological periods that witnessed significant changes in the trajectory of global biodiversity (Devonian, early Triassic). Our main objective consists in combining our model of marine biodiversity (Stockey, Pohl et al., PNAS 2021; Zacaï, Monnet, Pohl et al., Science Advances 2021) with our updated environmental reconstructions of the last 550 million years (Pohl et al., revised for Nature) in order to provide new insights into the trajectory that led biodiversity to its present-day state.
