May 2025 Funk Biogeography Seminar — Jacqulyne Gill

While there is a growing appreciation of the role that large herbivores play in structuring plant communities and confering ecological resilience at broad spatial scales, empirical tests of these ideas remain rare, especially in deep time. In this lecture, I present novel dietary evidence from ancient DNA that reveals the mechanisms for how woolly mammoths acted as ecological keystones, shaping community composition, functional diversity, and coexistence in the Pleistocene mammoth steppe. By reconstructing trophic interactions and behavioral niches, these data provide new mechanistic insight into how top-down controls influence biodiversity and buffer ecosystems against environmental change. This work bridges paleoecology, molecular biology, and resilience theory to test foundational ideas in ecology and biogeography, with implications for understanding—and managing—the dynamics of biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene.

Jacquelyn is a Professor of Paleoecology at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute. She is a paleoecologist and biogeographer, bringing the perspectives of space and time to bear on questions in ecology and global change science. Her work takes a community ecology approach to help understand how species and their interactions have responded to interacting drivers (like climate change and extinction) through time. She directs the BEAST Lab, which investigates 1) the legacies “biotic upheavals” like the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna on vegetation, 2) biotic interactions and drivers of landscape change on large spatiotemporal scales, 3) plant range dynamics and vulnerability to climate change, and 5) what paleoecology, Indigenous archaeology, and Traditional Ecological Knowledges can tell us about human-environment interactions in the past.