Abstract:

Landscape-scale accumulations of skeletal material are untapped sources of multi-generational historical ecological data. Ten transects in each of four habitats (grasslands, forests, river-margins, and lake-margins) were used to survey the death assemblage of the well-studied large-mammal community of Yellowstone National Park (YNP), WY to test the fidelity of bone accumulations with respect to current and historical populations. In addition, characteristics of bone weathering in this cold, temperate climate were investigated through study of carcasses with known postmortem durations as well as AMS radiocarbon dating of bones found across the landscape. The geographic fidelity of the YNP death assemblage was also tested by comparing the geographic distributions of skeletal remains across the landscape to existing knowledge of habitat-use by elk. The YNP death assemblage captures the diversity of a majority of mammals larger than 1 kg including all native ungulates. Proportional abundances of species in the ungulate death assemblage accurately reflect ungulate community structure and are sensitive to changes in that structure over time. Bone weathering was discovered to be decadal to centennial in time scale, thus, bones in YNP represent significant numbers of generations of ecological insight and provide a rich historical perspective on the ungulate community. It was also established that concentrations of antlers and calf bones correctly demarcate bull elk wintering grounds and calving grounds, respectively. Thus, multigenerational biogeographic patterns can also be identified through investigation of death assemblages. Bone surveys provide quantitative historical data on terrestrial communities that are often otherwise unobtainable in poorly studied ecosystems and offer a new source of data to illuminate population variability over decadal- to centennial-timescales. A supplementary data file that includes the raw transect data collected for this study is digitally attached to this dissertation ("Miller_YNP_Appendix_A_2.csv").