Project Aims

The project has eight major aims:

1. Utilize stratigraphically important fossil groups (e.g. conodonts, ammonoids) to establish robust biostratigraphic frameworks for the Early Triassic sequences worldwide, to enable accurate, high-resolution global correlation
2. Elucidate the recovery patterns of various fossil groups (e.g. brachiopods, bivalves, echinoderms, foraminifers etc.) by conducting phylogenetic analyses to help minimize sampling biases, and thus determining the true timing of recovery of various clades
3. Utilize palaeoecological, palaeontological (body and trace fossils), and sedimentological information to fully document marine communities throughout the recovery interval in a variety of environments from shallow to deep habitats and tropical to temperate climate zones, and construct a novel database of global P/Tr ecosystem types
4. Analyze community structures (e.g. alpha diversity, richness, dominance, tiering, biotic guilds), and to test and further refine a global palaeoecological recovery model recently proposed [35, 36] and forming the basis of part of this project
5. Assess the roles of the so-called disaster taxa, Lazarus taxa and refugia in the recovery communities, and determine the relationships between microbial (stromatolites, thrombolites, calcimicrobia) structures and metazoa within a single community and between microbialite and metazoan communities
6. Utilize geochemical signatures (carbon, oxygen and sulfur isotopes, and biomarkers) as independent indicators of environmental and climate changes during the recoverystages in different habitats and climate zones
7. Reveal catastrophic events recorded in the Early Triassic successions and elucidate their relationships with those triggering the P/Tr mass extinction as well as effects on the Early Triassic ecosystems by integrating geochemical, palaeontological and sedimentological data
8. Elucidate the factors controlling the recovery rates of benthic communities in various habitats and climate zones, determine what are the similarities and differences in the response of the marine ecosystem to biotic crises at different scales, and assess climate effects on the restoration of a defaunated marine ecosystem.