Wolfgang Kiessling

Wolfgang Kiessling
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Wolfgang verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg | FAU · Department of Geography and Earth Sciences

Prof. Dr.
Revisiting reefal responses to ancient hyperthermal events.

About

300
Publications
145,932
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Introduction
My research targets ecological and evolutionary processes on large spatial scales and at time scales from decades to millions of years. Focusing on patterns in deep time, I aim to derive general principles of the interplay between earth system change and biodiversity dynamics in marine ecosystems.
Additional affiliations
October 2012 - present
Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg
January 2009 - present
University of Buenos Aires
January 2007 - present

Publications

Publications (300)
Article
Full-text available
High biodiversity has been shown to enhance ecological stability on small spatial scales and over intervals of weeks to decades. It remains unclear, however, whether this diversity-stability relationship can be scaled up to regional scales, or to longer timescales. Without empirical validation at larger scales, the implications of the diversity-sta...
Article
Full-text available
Besides helping to identify species traits that are commonly linked to extinction risk, the fossil record may also be directly relevant for assessing the extinction risk of extant species. Standing geographical distribution or occupancy is a strong predictor of both recent and past extinction risk, but the role of changes in occupancy is less widel...
Article
Full-text available
Cradle of Diversity Is the biological diversity of reefs a result of attracting species that originated elsewhere, or are they particularly important as cradles of evolution? Kiessling et al. (p. 196 ; see the cover) examine a large database of fossil benthic marine organisms dating back to the Cambrian to test these questions. It seems that reefs,...
Article
Full-text available
Both natural and human-induced stressors cause reef erosion, resulting in reef rubble formation. When consolidated, the rubble can facilitate reef recovery, sparking interest in artificial rubble stabilization as a method for reef restoration. However, our understanding of the natural processes governing coral reef regeneration within rubble beds i...
Preprint
Reefs are important hotspots of marine biodiversity today, and acted as cradles of diversification in the geological past. However, we know little about how the diversity of reef-supporting regions varied through deep time, and how this differed from other regions. We quantified regional diversity patterns in reef-supporting and non-reef-supporting...
Article
Full-text available
Ancient changes in the biosphere, from organismic traits to wholesale ecosystem changes, can be aligned with climate forcing across the Phanerozoic. Clear examples of abrupt climate warming causing biodiversity crises are primarily found between the Permian and Paleogene periods. During these times, catastrophic events occurred, resembling the extr...
Article
Full-text available
Census-based approaches to reefal carbonate budgets are increasingly being used to project the near-future fate of tropical coral reefs. Some of the census parameters are difficult to achieve in fossil reef systems, which may be the reason why no census-based estimates of fossil reef carbonate production have been published until now. Here, we appl...
Article
Aim To test if temperature significantly influences the global biogeographic distribution of marine epifaunal bivalves via their skeletal mineralogy. Location Global. Taxa Marine, epifaunal bivalves. Methods The skeletal mineralogy of 45,789 epifaunal bivalve occurrences from 669 species from the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) was...
Preprint
Full-text available
Geographic range has long been acknowledged as an important determinant of extinction risk. The trajectory of geographic range through time, however, has not received as much scientific attention. Here, we test the role of change in geographic range – assessed by a measure of proportional occupancy of grid cells – in determining the extinction risk...
Article
Full-text available
In the face of rising global temperatures, coral reefs experience coral mass bleaching and mortality. Subtropical and mesophotic environments may represent refugia for reef corals under climate change, where they can survive and eventually recolonize degraded areas. Using a comprehensive database of fossil reefs, we empirically assess the efficacy...
Article
Full-text available
Aim To determine the degree to which assemblages of planktonic foraminifera track thermal conditions. Location The world's oceans. Time Period The last 700,000 years of glacial–interglacial cycles. Major Taxa Studied Planktonic foraminifera. Methods We investigate assemblage dynamics in planktonic foraminifera in response to temperature changes...
Article
Full-text available
Hard substrate communities can impact coral reef growth by adding or removing calcium carbonate when they act as encrusters or bioeroders, respectively. Although such sclerobiont communities are known across the Phanerozoic, the Triassic saw a substantial increase in reef macrobioerosion. This study provides the first quantitative assessment of scl...
Preprint
Full-text available
Climate and ecosystems exhibit dynamic behavior across various timescales, but existing studies often focus on singular timescales when examining ecosystem responses to climate. Here we develop a conceptual and analytical framework using spectral analysis that examines a continuum of timescales, from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years. By c...
Preprint
Full-text available
In the face of rising global temperatures, coral reefs experience coral mass bleaching and mortality. Subtropical and mesophotic environments may represent refugia for reef corals under climate change, where they can survive and eventually recolonize degraded areas. Using a comprehensive database of fossil reefs, we empirically assess the efficacy...
Preprint
Full-text available
Hard substrate communities can impact coral reef growth by adding or removing calcium carbonate when they act as encrusters or bioeroders, respectively. Although such sclerobiont communities are known across the Phanerozoic, the Triassic saw a substantial increase in reef macrobioerosion. This study provides the first quantitative assessment of scl...
Preprint
Full-text available
Aim To determine the degree to which assemblages of planktonic foraminifera track thermal conditions. Location The world’s oceans. Time period The last 700,000 years of glacial-interglacial cycles. Major taxa studied Planktonic foraminifera. Methods We investigate assemblage dynamics in planktonic foraminifera in response to temperature changes...
Article
Full-text available
The congruence between rock quantity and biodiversity through the Phanerozoic has long been acknowledged. Rock record bias and common cause are the most discussed hypotheses: the former emphasizes that the changes in diversity through time fully reflect rock availability; the latter posits that the correlation between rock and fossil records is dri...
Article
Full-text available
Siliceous marine ecosystems play a critical role in shaping the Earth's climate system by influencing rates of organic carbon burial and marine authigenic clay formation (i.e., reverse weathering). The ecological demise of silicifying organisms associated with the Permian‐Triassic mass extinction is postulated to have elevated marine authigenic cla...
Article
Full-text available
Corallite sizes reflect a continuum in the efficacy of photosymbiosis in colonial reef corals, with smaller corallite sizes generally associated with higher autotrophy. Using a large compilation of reef-coral traits and corallite diameters as a proxy, we test here the hypothesis that photosymbiotic efficacy has increased over the evolutionary histo...
Preprint
Full-text available
Siliceous marine ecosystems play a critical role in climate regulation and the severe impact of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction on silica-secreting animals may have contributed to a sustained greenhouse climate during the Early Triassic, via decreased export of organic carbon burial and increased reverse weathering rates. Yet, our understandin...
Preprint
Full-text available
Siliceous marine ecosystems play a critical role on the Earth’s climate system through its influence on organic carbon burial and rates of marine authigenic clay formation (i.e. reverse weathering). The ecological demise of silicifying organisms associated with the Permian-Triassic mass extinction is postulated to have elevated rates of marine auth...
Article
Full-text available
Drivers of reef decline are well known both today and in the geological past. Considerably less is known about the preconditions for a pantropical expansion of coral reefs. The geological record of reef building is characterised by considerably long intervals with very limited reef expansion and geologically brief (< 20 million years) episodes of p...
Poster
Modern coral reefs are among the most vulnerable ecosystems to climate change. Accordingly, we hypothesize that past hyperthermal events had lasting impacts on reef coral communities. Specifically, novel communities are expected to emerge after ancient warming events, where novel communities are those that document a rapid and irreversible shift in...
Article
Earth’s biodiversity and human societies face pollution, overconsumption of natural resources,urbanization, demographic shifts, social and economic inequalities, and habitat loss, many of whichare exacerbated by climate change. Here, we review links among climate, biodiversity, and society anddevelop a roadmap toward sustainability. These includeli...
Article
Full-text available
Driven by climate change, marine biodiversity is undergoing a phase of rapid change that has proven to be even faster than changes observed in terrestrial ecosystems. Understanding how these changes in species composition will affect future marine life is crucial for conservation management, especially due to increasing demands for marine natural r...
Article
Paleontology has provided invaluable basic knowledge on the history of life on Earth. The discipline can also provide substantial knowledge to societal challenges such as climate change. The long-term perspective of climate change impacts on natural systems is both a unique selling point and a major obstacle to becoming more pertinent for policy-re...
Chapter
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Hotspots of tropical marine biodiversity are areas that harbour disproportionately large numbers of species compared to surrounding regions. The richness and location of these hotspots have changed throughout the Cenozoic. Here, we review the global dynamics of Cenozoic tropical marine biodiversity hotspots, including the four major hotspots of the...
Article
Full-text available
The Cambrian saw a dramatic increase of metazoan diversity and abundance. Between-assemblage diversity (beta diversity) soared in the first three Cambrian stages, suggesting a rapid increase in the geodisparity of marine animals during the Cambrian radiation. However, it remains unclear how these changes scale up to first-order biogeographic patter...
Conference Paper
Morphological traits of reef-building corals can reflect the functions of corals and the functional diversity of entire reefs. For example, corallite diameter and corallite integration have been used to infer photosymbiosis in corals, while the growth form manifests the structural complexity of the reef. A combination of traits may thus be particul...
Article
Full-text available
The biggest known mass extinction in the history of animal life occurred at the Permian–Triassic boundary and has often been linked to global warming. Previous studies have suggested that a geologically rapid (<40 kyr) temperature increase of more than 10°C occurred simultaneously with the main extinction pulse. This hypothesis is challenged by geo...
Article
Full-text available
Fossil occurrence databases are indispensable resources to the palaeontological community, yet present unique data cleaning challenges. Many studies devote significant attention to cleaning fossil occurrence data prior to analysis, but such efforts are typically bespoke and difficult to reproduce. There are also no standardised methods to detect an...
Article
Full-text available
Trait-based approaches are increasingly relevant to understand ecological and evolutionary patterns. A comprehensive trait database for extant reef corals is already available and widely used to reveal vulnerabilities to environmental disturbances including climate change. However, the lack of similar trait compilations for extinct reef builders pr...
Article
Full-text available
Anthropogenic disturbance and climate change can result in dramatic increases in the emergence of new, ecologically novel, communities of organisms. We used a standardised framework to detect local novel communities in 2135 pollen time series over the last 25,000 years. Eight thousand years of post‐glacial warming coincided with a threefold increas...
Article
Full-text available
Ecological interactions are ubiquitous on tropical coral reefs, where sessile organisms coexist in limited space. Within these high-diversity systems, reef-building scleractinian corals form an intricate interaction network. The role of biotic interactions among reef corals is well established on ecological timescales. However, its potential effect...
Article
Mid-to Late Cretaceous olistostrome generation ensued sequentially, linked to progressive southwest-directed thrusting of the Semail Ophiolite towards and over Arabia – at first in the northeastern part of the oceanic Hawasina Basin (Umar Sub-Basin) and then in its southwestern part (Hamrat Duru-Sub-Basin). Thrusting steepened slopes, causing seism...
Chapter
Full-text available
Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_FinalDraft_Chapter03.pdf
Article
Full-text available
The main text in the “Mixed-Effects Models” section inaccurately summarized two features of supplemental Table S5. The table is correct and can be replicated from the archived data and code associated with the paper (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3491853). 1. The text stated, “The three highest-ranking linear mixed-effects models for minimum span...
Article
Full-text available
Anthropogenic climate change is increasingly threatening biodiversity on a global scale. Rich spots of biodiversity, regions with exceptionally high endemism and/or number of species, are a top priority for nature conservation. Terrestrial studies have hypothesized that rich spots occur in places where long-term climate change was dampened relative...
Article
Biodiversity dynamics are shaped by a complex interplay between current conditions and historic legacy. The interaction of short- and long-term climate change may mask the true relationship of evolutionary responses to climate change if not specifically accounted for. These paleoclimate interactions have been demonstrated for extinction risk and bi...
Article
Significance The effect of climate change on biodiversity is dependent on previous climatic trends. For example, climate warming is more deleterious when added to a long-term warming trend. We tested how the interaction of short- and long-term climate change affects origination rates through time. Using data from the marine fossil record, we show t...
Article
Full-text available
Amidst long-term fluctuations of the abiotic environment, the degree to which life organizes into distinct biogeographic provinces (provinciality) can reveal the fundamental drivers of global biodiversity. Our understanding of present-day biogeography implies that changes in the distribution of continents across climatic zones have predictable effe...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Coral communities today are negatively affected by anthropogenic greenhouse gas release causing global warming and ocean acidification. Natural greenhouse gas release by massive volcanism is thought to have caused one of the Big Five mass extinctions at the end of the Triassic period (200 million years ago). This hyperthermal event triggered one of...
Preprint
Full-text available
Anthropogenic climate change is increasingly threatening biodiversity on a global scale. Richspots of biodiversity, regions with exceptionally high endemism and/or number of species, are a top priority for nature conservation. Terrestrial studies have hypothesised that richspots occur in places where long-term climate change was dampened relative t...
Technical Report
Full-text available
The Scientific Outcome was produced by participants in the first-ever IPCC-IPBES co-sponsored workshop which took place in December 2020. This workshop is placed in the context of recent international agreements including the Paris Agreement, the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and ongoing preparation for the post-2020 global biodiversi...
Presentation
Global warming today is taking its toll on coral reefs globally, particularly affecting scleractinian corals which rely on their symbionts for nutrition. In the past, hyperthermal events have probably triggered evolutionary losses and gains of symbiosis in corals. Accordingly, we expect photosymbiotic corals to be more strongly affected than non-sy...
Article
Full-text available
Aim The current assessment of extinction risk in reef corals by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has been criticized, because coral life‐history traits associated with resilience are not reflected in the conservation status. We aimed to carry out a quantitative assessment of the link between reef coral traits and species ex...
Article
Full-text available
Many ecological and evolutionary hypotheses have been proposed to explain the latitudinal diversity gradient, i.e. the increase in species richness from the poles to the tropics. Among the evolutionary hypotheses, the ‘out of the tropics’ (OTT) hypothesis has received considerable attention. The OTT posits that the tropics are both a cradle and sou...
Article
Climate change affects life at global scales and across systems but is of special concern in areas that are disproportionately rich in biological diversity and uniqueness. Using a meta-analytical approach, we analysed >8000 risk projections of the projected impact of climate change on 273 areas of exceptional biodiversity, including terrestrial and...
Conference Paper
Taphonomic effects complicate the assessment of variations in biodiversity over time. Most pre-Cenozoic fossil assemblages have been altered through taphonomic effects, such as lithification and aragonite dissolution. Several studies have found alpha (local) and gamma (global) diversity in marine ecosystems to be low in the early Mesozoic and then...
Article
Full-text available
Assessing extinction risk from climate drivers is a major goal of conservation science. Few studies, however, include a long-term perspective of climate change. Without explicit integration, such long-term temperature trends and their interactions with short-term climate change may be so dominant that they blur or even reverse the apparent direct r...
Poster
Full-text available
Biodiversity dynamics are shaped by a complex interplay between current conditions and historic legacy (Antao et al. (2020), Svenning et al. (2015)). While a simple relationship is often used to link evolution with temperature, short- term climate change likely interacts with previous temperature trends when in uencing the pace of origination. Such...
Article
Assessing extinction risk from climate drivers is a major goal of conservation science. Few studies, however, include a long-term perspective of climate change. Without explicit integration, such long-term temperature trends and their interactions with short-term climate change may be so dominant that they blur or even reverse the apparent direct r...
Article
Full-text available
The lower Oligocene coral communities and reefs exposed in the Lessini Shelf of northern Italy may record one of the oldest well-developed barrier reef/lagoon systems of the Cenozoic. However, the rimmed-shelf interpretation has been repeatedly challenged in favour of a ramp model with scattered corals. Based upon a re-analysis of selected localiti...
Article
Full-text available
A diverse assemblage of bodily preserved sponges has been recovered from a lower Lutetian tuffite horizon in the Chiampo Valley, Lessini Mountains, Italy. The sponge assemblage is dominated by hexactinellids and lithistids. Using uniformitarian criteria, the composition of the assemblage suggests a water depth greater than 200 m. Sponges are often...
Article
Full-text available
Organismic groups vary non‐randomly in their vulnerability to extinction. However, it is unclear whether the same groups are consistently vulnerable, regardless of the dominant extinction drivers, or whether certain drivers have their own distinctive and predictable victims. Given the challenges presented by anthropogenic global warming, we focus o...
Presentation
Species traits and spatial distributions influence the extinction risk of species as a result of abiotic and biotic change. We performed a comparative assessment of the relationship between traits and extinction risk of reef corals in the modern oceans against Plio-Pleistocene reef corals. We chose the Plio-Pleistocene as most of the corals during...
Presentation
Full-text available
The end-Triassic mass extinction and reef crisis was a significant crisis in the evolution of scleractinian corals. The crisis is thought to have been caused by volcanically induced global warming. Accordingly, we would expect photosymbiotic corals to be more strongly affected than non-symbiotic corals. However, although corallite integration has d...
Article
Full-text available
Crustose coralline red algae (CCA) play a key role in the consolidation of many modern tropical coral reefs. It is unclear, however, if their function as reef consolidators was equally pronounced in the geological past. Using a comprehensive database on ancient reefs, we show a strong correlation between the presence of CCA and the formation of tru...
Article
Change begets change In the Anthropocene, humans are altering ecosystems, causing extinctions, and reassorting species distributions. As we facilitate these changes, we are creating new collections of species. Such “novel communities” are not specific to our epoch, and the patterns of diversity and extinction associated with past events can shed li...
Article
Full-text available
Calcareous red algae have been important components in reefal facies since the Mesozoic but their volumetric contribution to Palaeozoic reefs was usually low. Here, we report a reef-building community dominated by Parachaetetes, a genus of solenoporacean red algae, overgrowing uppermost Permian sponge reefs in Cili (Hunan Province, South China). Th...
Poster
Full-text available
Paleontology is a small subject at universities. In Germany, there less than 50 professorships scattered across different locations. The fragmentation makes it difficult to develop common visions and research priorities. Over the last few decades, Paleontology has been transforming from a largely descriptive subject to a predictive science with und...
Preprint
Full-text available
Local and global environmental change is transforming ecological assemblages into new configurations, resulting in ecosystems with novel communities. Here we develop a robust methodology for the identification of novel communities, examine patterns in their natural chance of occurrence, and quantify the probability of local extinction, emigration,...