Grant: Discovery Launch Supplement

Trace fossils represent evidence of animal (invertebrate) activity and record their behaviors. Traces show how animals react to different stresses in the environment they inhabit. Climate change affects animals living in coastal, fluvial, and deep-sea environments through rising temperature, extreme weather events, changes to ocean circulation, and food availability. Studies of coastal areas are critical because they are the most susceptible to climate change, experiencing rising sea levels, biodiversity loss, and increased human activity. However, coastal areas also help mitigate climate change by trapping organic carbon and providing important ecosystem services (e.g., food production, flood protection). The connection between carbon cycling and burrows in coastal areas is not fully understood yet and requires further investigation. The long-term goal of my research program is to establish short- and long-term monitoring of modern tidal flats across a range of climates (subtropical, temperate, polar) to obtain a baseline for trace-fossil distribution and its change through time. I also aim to define how burrows affect the cycling of carbon in modern coastal environments and model climate changes based on ichnological proxies using modern observations and past sedimentary archives (i.e., deep ocean and tidal flat cores). As such, the short-term objectives are to: 1) improve our understanding and decouple environmental stresses acting on infauna in coastal zones of various climates through the documentation of sediment composition, bedforms, water and sediment parameters, burrow morphology, and tracemakers; 2) explore changes in burrow distributions due to the redistribution of taxa with current changes in climate by conducting semicontinuous field observations, sampling, drone imagery, remote sensing, and modeling of coastal zones in subtropical, temperate, and polar climates; 3) record the sedimentology and ichnology of a variably expressed and sedimentologically complex fluvio-tidal transition zone in a muddy river estuary and construct facies models to further help with its identification in the rock record; and 4) continue research on the response of deep-sea communities to past global events to define how animals reacted to big changes in world's climate through changes in food delivery, oxygenation, substrate consistency, and hydraulic energy. In a nutshell, trace fossils can help us understand past and present climate changes by providing clues to the changing physico-chemical conditions and responding to those changes by the modification of their burrow architecture and food-storage strategies. The use of trace fossils in climate research is a novel approach as no researchers have actually demonstrated the examples of changes to burrow morphology in response to climate change. This research will give us valuable insights into how our world might change in the future, train a new generation of HQP, and apply EDI principles to practice.