Over the past few thousand years, the Bay Area has been dramatically altered by rapid population growth and urbanization. In order to understand how these factors have impacted modern faunal communities, it is necessary to first create pre-impact baselines for comparison. Here, I reconstruct past small mammal communities of Stanford Lands using skeletal remains from three late Holocene archaeological sites. My preliminary results suggest that today’s small mammal communities are fundamentally distinct from their pre-European counterparts, with human impact (such as urbanization) being a driving factor.

Maria Viteri is a fourth-year PhD student in the Hadly Lab at Stanford University. She received her B.S. in Biology from the University of Chicago. Her research lies at the intersections of conservation, ecology, and paleontology. Specifically, she is interested in tracking faunal community change over time to create a deeper context for the biodiversity crises of today and tomorrow. At Stanford she is working on discerning the fingerprints of the Anthropocene on small mammal communities in the San Francisco Bay Area using skeletal remains from raptor pellets and archaeological sites.