Understanding Climate Change Through Ancient DNA and Modern Science

With support from the Chancellor’s Grant for Interdisciplinary Research, my research in the Atacama Desert in Chile combines modern ecology, paleoecology, geochemistry, and cutting-edge molecular techniques, such as ancient DNA, to understand how desert ecosystems have responded to climate change over the last 50,000 years.

The Atacama Desert offers a unique and underutilized natural archive—rodent middens, which are debris piles left at rodent nest sites. These middens contain preserved plant and animal remains, providing a rare glimpse into past ecological conditions. By studying these remains, we aim to reconstruct the long-term dynamics of arthropod communities, particularly how they have responded to changes in precipitation, which is the major environmental driver in desert systems.

Experience and Highlights

This project is particularly exciting because we combine ancient DNA with traditional morphological identification to analyze the arthropod communities. Most ecological studies have focused on individual species’ responses to environmental changes, but we are looking at entire communities across long temporal scales. This integration of paleoecology and modern ecology allows us to ask big-picture questions: how have arthropod communities in arid ecosystems responded to changing climate conditions over millennia? And importantly, how can we predict future community responses as climate change continues to impact precipitation patterns?

In addition to using ancient DNA, we employ isotope geochemistry to analyze these communities across different temporal scales. This work is groundbreaking, as we use advanced molecular tools to examine and compare past and present ecosystems, providing us with a clearer understanding of biodiversity resilience in the face of environmental stress.

The collaboration with the Pontificia Universidad Católica (PUC) in Chile has been instrumental in advancing the project. The research team includes experts from Rutgers and PUC, combining knowledge in community ecology, paleoecology, geochemistry, and genomics, which has helped foster a successful partnership and laid the groundwork for future research and educational exchange.

Additionally, we have developed a toolkit to help standardize ecological analyses in these middens, addressing data limitations like temporal discontinuities. This work will provide a broader and more accurate understanding of biodiversity patterns and community-environment relationships.

Impact on You and the Rutgers Community

The impact of the Chancellor’s 15-in-5 initiatives extends far beyond my own work. Several undergraduate and graduate students have had the opportunity to conduct hands-on research in my lab, thanks to this funding, and through the Chancellor’s Grant for Student Research. For example, Jenna Brodnyan, an undergraduate student, has been involved in both field and lab work, learning essential research techniques, such as arthropod sampling and genomic analysis. Udari Peris, a Center for Compututational and Integrative Biology (CCIB) PhD student, has also benefited from this funding to conduct carbon dating on paleoecological samples, which is helping us refine our understanding of past climate shifts.

These opportunities provide students with invaluable real-world experience in cutting-edge research that they might not otherwise have access to. This support has not only allowed students to develop critical research skills; it has also empowered them to contribute significantly to a project that addresses some of the most pressing questions in ecology and climate change.

Beyond student training, this project fosters international collaboration and strengthens the connection between Rutgers and global research networks. It also showcases Rutgers' commitment to providing students with opportunities to engage in meaningful research that tackles some of the most urgent questions in environmental science.

The broader Rutgers community benefits from this project as it highlights the university’s commitment to interdisciplinary research and international collaboration while providing students with access to cutting-edge methods and real-world applications in the field of environmental science.

Broader Impacts and Future Potential

The work we are doing in the Atacama Desert not only expands our understanding of how communities have responded to past climate shifts but also has the potential to influence how we predict and manage biodiversity in a changing world. This research will allow us to reconstruct the history of arthropod communities, assess the accuracy of different identification methods, and develop a pipeline for studying a broad range of taxa across time.

In addition to its impact on the field, this project lays the groundwork for future funding opportunities, such as potential NSF submissions, to further expand the scope of the research across other desert ecosystems in Chile and the United States.

Thanks to the Chancellor’s 15-in-5 initiatives, we are advancing our understanding of long-term ecological change in desert ecosystems and providing students with an unparalleled opportunity to engage in cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research. I am excited about our progress so far and the continued impact this project will have on our understanding of biodiversity in the context of climate change.