Ecology of the past

Institute for Biodiversity & Ecosystem Dynamics(18/07/2015)

The second day of the summer school was focused on understanding individual proxies. The day started with introductory talks to five proxies that can be used in palaeo-environmental research:

• Diatoms (Teresa Vegas),
• Pigments (Sarah Metcalfe),
• XRF (Teresa Vegas),
• Charcoal (Crystal McMichael), and
• Biomarkers (Boris Jansen).

Students then broke up into four groups each of which focused on an individual proxy. Working collaboratively and in discussion with staff members each group was faced with a ‘raw’ data set for their proxy which they had to process. Once they had ‘played’ with the data for a while they then had to report back to the entire group.

Where available the groups worked with Lake Erazo data generated from the sediment cores recovered during the field school. After reporting back each groups was asked to make…