When plants first moved onto land, they turned bare rock into soil, reshaped rivers, and pulled enough carbon from the atmosphere to cool the entire planet—but scientists still cannot say exactly which plant groups caused which global changes, because the fossil record is too patchy to read directly. This project tackles that gap by building a computer model that feeds real fossil data—not just guesses from modern plants—into simulations of ancient climate and ecology. Previous models ignored fossils entirely because the record is so incomplete; the team’s new approach uses 3D imaging to extract physiological traits from fossilised plants that were previously impossible to study. The model will map where and when different plant groups spread, from the first moss-like pioneers to the earliest forests, and then test how each group altered atmospheric CO₂, oxygen levels, and global temperature. If it works, the model will settle a long-standing debate about whether plants caused a major ancient mass extinction and how they created the oxygen-rich, stable climate that allowed animals—including humans—to evolve. This is fundamental science: it will not change anything in daily life tomorrow, but understanding how life reshaped a planet’s atmosphere and geology is the kind of knowledge that underpins everything from climate models to searches for habitable worlds.
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The colonisation of land by plants transformed the Earth; they weathered bedrock, developed the first soils, changed river systems and locked up huge reserves of carbon as biomass. The radiation (spread) of plants is predicted to have caused global cooling, changes in atmospheric CO2 and O2 levels and a mass extinction event. However, linking specific events in plant evolution to these changes, on a causal basis, has proved to be difficult and contentious. This means that our understanding and estimation of the impacts of plant colonisation on the Earth is still unclear. The primary objective of this work is to address this major unresolved question in the natural sciences. Our lack of understanding of the global impact of plant colonisation results from uncertainty in both how much of the continental surface was covered by plants and how plants physically interacted with the Earth system during their early evolution. This information is largely obscured by the very incomplete nature of the fossil record. Due to the limited fossil record, previous attempts often completely ignore fossils and instead assess the impacts of land plant colonisation based on extrapolations from living species. The obvious limitation here is that this approach overlooks our only direct evidence for early plant life and does not take into account the origin of new functional traits and plant groups during plant evolution. To understand and estimate what impacts plants made on the Earth system we urgently need a new approach. Deep time ecological modelling that directly incorporates data from fossils provides the solution to this problem. We will use this approach, for the first time, in project MapRad. Our proposal is underpinned by the recent development of a new rapid deep time vegetation model (FLORA) which can be coupled with an Earth System Model (SCION) to assess global vegetation-climate-biogeochemical feedbacks in deep time. In MapRad, we will push the frontiers of deep time ecological modelling by building the new PALEOFLORA-SCION model that incorporates data from fossils that lived in the time periods under examination rather than extrapolations from living species. This approach is made possible by recent developments in imaging and 3D reconstruction techniques that allow quantitative extraction of morpho-physiological data from previously intractable fossil groups. Our approach is timely as both the recent advances in modelling and fossil imaging were pioneered separately by our project team and will be combined here for the first time. We have three key objectives: Map the spread of the first forests and their impact on terrestrial biomass Map the pre-forest radiation of land plants from the Ordovician to the Early Devonian Establish the impacts that the evolution of different plant groups made to the Earth system Our project will develop the first evolving model, informed directly by fossil data, that charts the colonisation of land by plants and their rise to ecological dominance. This spatial and temporal map will allow us to test hitherto intractable major evolutionary hypotheses and evaluate the impact that plant colonisation had on atmospheric CO2 and O2 levels, and global cooling and extinction. This major step forward will provide the starting point to extend deep time ecological modelling of terrestrialisation for other groups of eukaryotes, such as fungi and animals, and will allow us to determine how plants created a habitable Earth today.
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