[B-PT25_2PM1] Biotic history and its relation to the Earth history

[BPT25-06] The influences of durations of geologic time units on diversity assessments

*Takao UBUKATA¹ (1.Shizuoka University)

Keywords:paleobiodiversity, time interval duration

The study on global diversity change has been at the center of paleontological studies during the past quarter-century. It is well known that the diversity estimates are readily biased by unevenness of sampling density and there have been many debates on how to remove sampling overprints. In addition, taxonomic richness in a given chronological interval can be also biased by variation in time interval duration because the piled up diversity becomes much greater as the interval gets longer. However, there is no simple solution for this problem because the rate of taxonomic turnover is not uniform through time; that's why we can define discrete chronostratigraphic units with various durations. In addition, actual data registered in the Paleobiology Database indicate less correlation between sampled-in-bin taxonomic richness and time interval duration.In the present study, the following simple computer simulations were performed to understand biases on diversity estimates derived from variation in time interval duration of chronologic units. A total of one million hypothetical taxa originated and went extinct at each time step (= 0.1 Ma) during the Phanerozoic at a given rate. In the present simulations, most (80%) of the turnovers were set to be concentrated at the boundary between intervals. The following different conditions were adopted for the turnover rates and sampling probability per time step within the interval; 1) fixed independent of the interval duration or 2) inversely proportional to the interval duration. The sampled-in-bin richness was counted for each age in each simulation.As a result of the above simulation, a positive correlation between piled up diversity and time interval duration was generated when sampling probability was fixed through time. This result seems a natural consequence because the number of sampling for each bin depends on the duration of the time interval and the sample-size effect was not removed in the present analysis. The correlation was particularly remarkable when the mean turnover rate was high and/or probability of sampling was low. However, such a correlation was found also in some cases even when the sampling probability per time step was inversely proportional to the interval duration. In the latter case, the correlation was significant when the sampling probability was moderate.