BURNEY 9707260 This project seeks to understand the dynamics of prehuman ecosystems on the island of Kaua'i in the Hawaiian Islands, and to identify the processes whereby environmental changes of the human period have led to the collapse of the native fauna and lowland flora. The overall methodology for creating a detailed picture of past environments and their changes will be through multidisciplinary study of paleoecological, paleontological, and archaeological sites. Cores collected from the late Quaternary sediments of the island will provide evidence for past vegetation, water chemistry, fire occurrence, and environmental catastrophes. Some of these sites also contain bones of indigenous birds and molluscs; these sites will be excavated in order to reconstruct past faunal assemblages. Pollen and charcoal evidence from the human period will provide an another record of changing human land-use patterns, which can be compared to paleontological evidence of the introduction of exotic animals and archaeological assessments of past human population densities and distributions. Measuring prehuman extinction rates will enrich discussions of climate vs. human activity in global extinction patterns. Obtaining high-resolution paleoclimate records will also permit the generation and testing of hypotheses regarding past changes in hurricane frequency, fire occurrence, and abrupt climate shifts like those to be expected from marine phenomena such as El Nino. A practical goal of this research will be to develop a comprehensive picture of prehuman environments of the island, as a guide to restoration ecology efforts underway in collaboration with the National Tropical Botanical Garden, which is adjacent to the primary sites. Landscape reconstructions from paleoecological data are likely to provide the best reference ecosystems available as models for ecological restoration efforts.
