Project MICROPALEOCON: Integrating Micromammal Paleobiology for Conservation

Intervenant : Ángel C. DOMÍNGUEZ GARCÍA, chercheur post-doctorant, UMR7194 HNHP

Résumé :

Small mammal species have long been served as reliable indicators for reconstructing past environments due to their high sensitivity to changes in both climate and habitats. Consequently, gaining a deeper understanding of their recent evolutionary trends and biogeographic processes is crucial in deciphering biotic responses to ongoing and future environmental changes. However, there is a notable scarcity of studies focused on small mammals during the Holocene period (the last 11,700 years BP) compared to older periods, which hampers our ability to achieve this goal. 

In this framework, the project MICROPALEOCON: Integrating Micromammal Paleobiology for Conservation aims to contribute new and valuable data to reconstruct species and population dynamics influenced by Holocene environmental and climatic changes, as well as anthropogenic alterations. This project is funded by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs by the MOPGA 2024 Visiting Fellowship Program. Specifically, the project aims to reconstruct the details of colonisation or interchange processes involving certain species of both commensal and wild small mammals since prehistoric times in the western Mediterranean Basin. Additionally, it seeks to elucidate recent retraction and fragmentation of their distribution ranges in other cases, leading them to be rare and threatened species. 

To achieve these goals, this project aims to develop a multidisciplinary study of Holocene small mammal fossil assemblages in the Western Mediterranean region (Iberian Peninsula and North Africa). This study will be carried out using innovative methodologies by means of Geometric Morphometrics (GMM) combined with Machine Learning (ML), paleogenetic techniques and radiocarbon dating. This multidisciplinary approach will allow to obtain reliable taxonomic identification of the fossil materials, as well as to analyse the relationships concerning morphometry and genetic between them and current populations. 

The valuable data obtained about the past evolution of small mammal will provide fundamental information to understand the origin of human-animal interactions and develop strategies to address the challenges of biodiversity loss that we face today.