BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:icalendar-ruby
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
X-WR-CALNAME:Colloquium:  Dr. Josh Miller
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Mountain Time (US & Canada)
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260609T182238Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_43649590108143
DTSTART:20231206T223000Z
DTEND:20231206T233000Z
DESCRIPTION:Dr. Josh Miller\nUniversity of Cincinnati\n\nTopic: Caribou mig
 rations and mammoth extinctions: Contributions from Arctic taphonomy\n\nAc
 ademic host: Carl Simpson\n\nAbstract: Bones lying on today’s landscapes
  provide opportunities to reconstruct historical states of modern ecosyste
 ms and offer insight into the biological data captured in fossil records. 
 Accumulations of shed caribou antlers (Rangifer tarandus) can dramatically
  expand the temporal scope with which we evaluate seasonal landscape use o
 f herds. Today\, maintaining access to spring calving grounds and associat
 ed migration routes are top conservation and management priorities. But ho
 w long have herds used particular calving grounds and how representative a
 re modern patterns of seasonal landscape use to periods that pre-date rece
 nt climatic perturbations and increased anthropogenic stresses? I address 
 these questions for the Porcupine Caribou Herd\, which uses the Coastal Pl
 ain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (AK) as a calving ground. While
  male caribou shed their antlers after they mate\, pregnant females mainta
 in their antlers until shedding them within days of giving birth (in the s
 pring). Using standardized antler surveys across the Coastal Plain\, I fou
 nd that female antlers are highly abundant on the tundra (~1\,000/km2) and
  the majority come from caribou that lived prior to the initiation of mode
 rn\, standardized biomonitoring studies (early 1980s). This includes antle
 r that were shed thousands of years ago\, illustrating that caribou have c
 alved on the Coastal Plain across at least several millennia. The millenni
 al-scale persistence of antlers in the Arctic also has implications for us
 ing DNA recovered from sediments (environmental DNA\; eDNA) to understand 
 the extinctions of Pleistocene species. For example\, mammoth eDNA recover
 ed from Holocene sediments has recently been used as evidence that this sp
 ecies\, contrary to the fossil record\, survived on mainland Alaska and Si
 beria until just a few thousand years ago. By evaluating bone persistence 
 globally\, I show that rather than indicating survival\, mammoth eDNA in H
 olocene sediments likely came from decaying Pleistocene individuals.
GEO:40.007953;-105.265846
LOCATION:Benson Earth Sciences\, 380
SUMMARY:Colloquium:  Dr. Josh Miller
URL;VALUE=URI:https://calendar.colorado.edu/event/colloquium_dr_josh_miller
CATEGORIES:Colloquium/Seminar
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