Contrasting terrestrial and marine ecospace dynamics after the end-Triassic mass extinction event

Abstract

Mass extinctions have fundamentally altered the structure of the biosphere throughout Earth's history. The ecological severity of mass extinctions is well studied in marine ecosystems by categorizing marine taxa into functional groups based on ‘ecospace’ approaches, but the ecological response of terrestrial ecosystems to mass extinctions is less well understood due to the lack of a comparable methodology. Here, we present a new terrestrial ecospace framework that categorizes fauna into functional groups as defined by tiering, motility and feeding traits. We applied the new terrestrial and traditional marine ecospace analyses to data from the Paleobiology Database across the end-Triassic mass extinction—a time of catastrophic global warming—to compare changes between the marine and terrestrial biospheres. We found that terrestrial functional groups experienced higher extinction severity, that taxonomic and functional richness are more tightly coupled in the terrestrial, and that the terrestrial realm continued to experience high ecological dissimilarity in the wake of the extinction. Although signals of extinction severity and ecological turnover are sensitive to the quality of the terrestrial fossil record, our findings suggest greater ecological pressure from the end-Triassic mass extinction on terrestrial ecosystems than marine ecosystems, contributing to more prolonged terrestrial ecological flux.