9306603 Burney Paleoecological techniques will be employed to characterize anthropogenic versus background-level environmental change and extinction in Madagascar. Trends in biotic communities will be measured on long time scales to contribute information on temporal variability, paleobiogeographic distributions, and causative mechanisms needed to evaluate and predict present and future biotic responses to environmental stress. Stratigraphic microfossil analyses, will be combined with collaborative efforts in dendrochronology, paleontology, archaeology, and geochronology to evaluate competing hypotheses concerning the causes of the late Holocene subfossil extinctions, and to begin constructing models of biotic change in Madagascar on ecological and evolutionary time scales. %%% This research represents an ideal opportunity to conduct an interdisciplinary study of the causes of large-scale extinctions. In particular, the research will attempt to evaluate the effects of human land use versus climate change on patterns of biodiversity in the tropics. Such information is essential for understanding and predicting future man-induced changes on global species richness. ***
