Theme: Palynology and the Global Climate Change Challenge
Date / time: 24 September 2026, 10:00-11:30 West African Time (UTC+1)
Location: Open online (see links below)
The Palynological Association of Nigeria will host a webinar to celebrate the life and work of pioneering African palynologists Prof. Margaret A. Sowunmi (1939-2025). The theme of the webinar will be Palynology and the Global Climate Change Challenge. It is a great honor for me to have been invited to give the keynote address by Prof. Peter Adegbenga Adeonipekun (University of Lagos, Nigeria) who is organizing the event. I look forward to taking part in this event and hearing the contributions from Prof. A.I. Olayinka (University of Ibadan, Nigeria) and Prof. Frank Neumann (North-Western University, South Africa). The event is open to join online, see details on the filer below.
McMichael, C. N. H., Heijink, B. M., Witteveen, N. H., Zwarts, A., & Bush, M. B. (2026). The pyrogeography of Amazonia: A Holocene perspective. Frontiers of Biogeography, 19, e169863. https://doi.org/10.21425/fob.19.169863
Post holiday, and pre-teaching, I was searching around for recent studies on the environmental history of Africa and came across the following which hopefully are also of interest to Mapping Ancient Africa enthusiasts. If you have a paper that would be nice to highlight here, please get in contact and I will be happy to include it.
Bengo, M. D., Gomat, H.-Y., Bita, A. M., Ifo, S. A., Maley, J., & Giresse, P. (2026). High-resolution study of the Late Holocene from pollen of a marine core in the Gulf of Guinea (Cameroon): Paleoenvironmental and ecological dynamics in Central Africa during the last 2,500 years. Open Journal of Forestry, 16(01), 83–105. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojf.2026.161006
Effiom, A. C., Neumann, F. H., Scott, L., & Bamford, M. K. (2025). Morphology and ecological significance of Holocene palynomorphs from the Indian Ocean Coastal Belt Biome of South Africa. Palynology, 49(3), 2428382. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916122.2024.2428382
Garbe, P., Behl, M., Es-Senussi, A., Lange-Athinodorou, E., & Meister, J. (2026). Holocene vegetation dynamics and agricultural development at ancient Bubastis (Egypt): Insights from phytolith analysis. Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, 5, 1778152. https://doi.org/10.3389/fearc.2026.1778152
García-Morato, S., Sánchez-Goñi, M. F., Urrego, D. H., & d’Errico, F. (2026). Climatic variability, vegetation dynamics, and cultural innovation in Southern Africa during the Middle Stone Age. Communications Earth & Environment, 7(1), 75. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-03051-0
Gunnell, Y., Mietton, M., Defive, E., Andriamitia, J., Montade, V., Jouannic, G., Voldoire, O., Ramanantsoa, A., Blondeau, S., Nicoud, G., & Rasoanimanana, R. R. (2026). Peat deposits as records of Quaternary tectonics and landscape dynamics in the semi-volcanic highlands of Madagascar. CATENA, 273, 110414. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.catena.2026.110414
Sylvestre, F., Melles, M., Wennrich, V., Dinies, M., Chalié, F., Swingedouw, D., Dallmeyer, A., Shi, X., Claussen, M., Jaeschke, A., Cocquyt, C., Karls, J., Kuper, J., Mallaye, B., Mazur, J.-C., Paillès, C., Rirongarti, R., Rethemeyer, J., Ritter-Prinz, B., … Kröpelin, S. (2026). Decadal-scale droughts disrupted the African Humid Period in the Sahara. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10336-7
Also, new volume of Palaeoecology of Africa coming soon, check out the contents list:
Lemma, B., Beil, L., Bromm, T., Glaser, B., Stein, M., Kobe, F., Fischer, M. L., Trauth, M. H., Gosling, W. D., Foerster, V., Schaebitz, F., Tarasov, P. E., & Kaboth-Bahr, S. (2026). Hierarchical controls on charcoal signatures: A framework for interpreting paleo-fire proxies. Organic Geochemistry, 105298. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orggeochem.2026.105298
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. It reflects a growing imbalance between people and the natural systems that support life on Earth. Building a more sustainable future requires more than understanding present-day environmental problems. It requires a deeper perspective on how ecosystems function, how they have changed over time, and how humans have interacted with them over long periods.
As a third-year bachelor student in biological and Earth sciences, I have become increasingly interested in these long-term interactions between climate, ecosystems, and human land use. I have learned that ecosystems are not stable systems, but dynamic ones that continuously respond to changes in climate, fire, and land use. Palaeoecology provides a way to reconstruct these long-term dynamics and place modern environmental change in a much deeper temporal context.
Although environmental change has always been part of Earth’s history, the current situation is characterised by a particularly rapid combination of climate change and human pressure on land systems. This makes long-term knowledge especially important, as it helps us distinguish natural variability from human-driven change and understand whether current ecosystems are within historical ranges of behaviour or entering new states.
Honours Program Thesis Extension
For the Honours Program alongside my bachelor’s degree, I extended my palaeoecology thesis with an interdisciplinary perspective focused on how long-term environmental knowledge can inform future land management. Rather than treating palaeoecology only as a reconstructive science, I explored its role as a bridge between past ecosystem dynamics and present-day sustainability challenges.
As a case study, I focused on the Dahomey Gap in West Africa, a forest–savanna transition zone that interrupts the continuous Guineo-Congolese rainforest belt. This region is not a fixed ecological boundary, but a shifting mosaic shaped over time by climate variability, fire, and human land use.
Encarni Montoya and Mª Carmen Trapote (CSIC research institute Geosciences Barcelona, Spain) are looking to recruit a PhD researcher to be involved with the MOMPAST (Past analogues of sustainable food production under climate change scenarios: Assessing pre-Columbian large-scale practices’ viability in flood-prone environments) project funded by the Spanish Council of Science and Innovation.
They are looking for a researcher with an enthusiasm for palaeoecological, archaeological, and environmental research, who is keen to undertake field work in remote tropical environments.
The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) Deep Chew Bahir (DeepCBH) drilling workshop took place in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) between the 30 June and 3 July 2026. The workshop brought around 50 scientists to Ethiopia, with a further 30, or so, in a satellite meeting in Potsdam (Germany) and online. The workshop was lead by Asfawossen Asrat, Verena Foerster, Daniel Gebregiorgis and Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr, and included scientist from 18 different countries (including 5 African countries).
The purpose of the meeting was to, build upon the previous successful drilling of the Chew Bahir basin which raised sediments spanning the last c. 600,000 years (Foerster et al., 2026), and to discuss the opportunities, logistics and requirements to make the recovery of sediments spanning the whole of the Quaternary (last 2.6 million years) from the Chew Bahir basin possible. Obtaining such a record would provide an unprecedented insight into the environmental and climatic change that was the backdrop for the evolution of our genus, Homo.
The skill sets of those attending was as diverse as the challenges and opportunities that undertaking such an epic coring expedition would require. These included the fundamentals of what equipment would be required to recover a sediment core down to depths of 1.2 kms below the Earths surface and what to do with 1.2 kms of sediment once it was recovered; as well as the scientific motivations for doing so from perspectives of hydrology, human-environment interactions and extreme microbial ecosystems.
Over the three days, discussion of the feasibility, ambition and funding was intense, and many steps forward were made in aligning the practical and scientific considerations. It was great to meet everyone and to have a chance to chat about the potential of this exciting project. The next step is to collate the workshop outputs and submit a full proposal to the ICDP in January 2027.
To find out more about the DeepCBH project visit the ICDP web site here.
Visit to the National Museum of EthiopiaDinkʼinesh / Lucy Continue Reading
As part of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) MSc Earth Sciences we run the course “Field Course Geoecological Systems”. In 2026 we returned to the village of Miraflores in the Lima province of Peru. Partnering with the Institiuto de Montanya (Mountain Institute) in Lima students spent four weeks engaged in participatory research with the Miraflores community. The integration of students within the community was made possible by the work of Mirella Gallardo and Rafa Schmitt.
In this year’s iteration of the course, we had groups of students working on four different topics: (i) water quality, (ii) soil carbon stocks, (iii) microbes and carbon in agricultural soils, and (iv) cultural heritage. The topics of the project were established in advance in consultation of the Mountain Institute and refined during a Town Hall meeting with the Miraflores residents during the first days of the visit.
Through the four weeks of the field work students learnt how to classify soil types, monitor water quality, and read the landscapes geology and geomorphology. Traversing the rugged Andean landscape from our base at c. 3600 meters above sea level up to peaks above 4000 meters. The students also worked with the Miraflores residents to discover their perception and knowledge of the landscape. Following the visits students conducted further analysis of water and soils back in the laboratories at the UvA. Once this work is complete all results will be compiled into a report, in English and Spanish, that will be distributed to participants.
This is the third time this field course has visited Miraflores and this year we were proud to present fliers detailing the key finds of previous years investigation to the community. We would like to thank the community of Miraflores for their continued kind welcome and partnership, and the Yauyos-Cochas National Park for their permission and support to work within this area.
Bulian, F., Aukes, T. F. N., Vittori, C., Du Plessis, J., Nascimento, M. N., Mazzini, I., Gravina, M. F., Maurer, A., Petrosino, P., Arienzo, I., Marra, F., & Sevink, J. (2026). A palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of the southern sector of the Ostia palaeolagoon and its implications for the reconstruction of late Holocene Sea level variations in central Tyrrhenian Italy. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 695, 113873. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2026.113873
Octavio Cruces Guaderrama, currently a University of Amsterdam MSc Biological Sciences researcher, runs the “Decolonizing Biosciences” podcast. In his podcasts Octavio brings together colonialism and biology, and aims to understand how colonialism has shaped – and still shapes – biological sciences, by discussing issues such as the misuse of medicine in the colonies, parachute science, and the nature/culture dichotomy.
In his current mini-series he is covering the “History of Amazonia”, with support from the Volkert van der Willigen Fund of the University of Amsterdam. You can listen to the fist Amazonian episode by clicking the link below, and check out his podcast feed here for earlier, and future, episodes.
Ecology of the past 