Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting
10-11 February 2015
by William Gosling
On Wednesday I attended my first Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting (NAEM) unfortunately, due to prior commitments, I was not able to attend the whole event, but I still managed to get a nice insight into the vibrant Dutch Ecological research community. Particularly exciting for me was the “Biodiversity in Space and Time” theme. Plenary sessions by Alexandre Anotonelli (University of Gothenburg) and Hans ter Steege (Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden) focused on the Amazon ecology past and present. The subsequent session on the same theme, organized by Daniel Kissling (University of Amsterdam) and Niels Raes (Naturalis Biodiversity Center), was also excellent and ranged from species richness patterns past and present in Gabon (Andre van Proosdij, Naturalis Biodiversity Center), through soil microbes (Kelly Ramirez, Netherlands Institute of Ecology) to the role of sea level change on island biodiversity (Kenneth Rijsdijk, University of Amsterdam). I am looking forward to attending more of these meetings in the future and getting involved with the NERN community.
I also enjoyed the first opportunity to share some of my work with the Dutch ecological community and was please to get positive comments on my talk “Global long-term ecological trajectories, dynamics and reorganisations”. It was an interesting opportunity to pull together data from a three projects to examine patterns of vegetation response to climate change; fossil pollen records spanning multiple glacial-interglacial cycles from Lake Titicaca (Hanselman et al., 2011) and Lake Bosumtwi (Miller & Gosling, 2014), with global climate-vegetation modelling (Gosling & Holden, 2011).
References
Gosling, W.D. & Holden, P.B. (2011) Precessional forcing of tropical vegetation carbon storage. Journal of Quaternary Science 26, 463-467.
Hanselman, J.A., Bush, M.B., Gosling, W.D., Collins, A., Knox, C., Baker, P.A. & Fritz, S.C. (2011) A 370,000-year record of vegetation and fire history around Lake Titicaca (Bolivia/Peru). Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 305, 201-214.
Miller, C.S. & Gosling, W.D. (2014) Quaternary forest associations in lowland tropical West Africa. Quaternary Science Reviews 84, 7-25.
Ecology of the past 