Lahr, M.M. et al. (2016) Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya. Nature 529, 394-398. doi: 10.1038/nature16477
Rademaker, K., Hodgins, G., Moore, K., Zarrillo, S., Miller, C., Bromley, G.R.M., Leach, P., Reid, D.A., Yepez Alvarez, W. & Sandweiss, D.H. (2014) Paleoindian settlement of the high-altitude Peruvian Andes. Science 346, 466-469. doi: 10.1126/science.1258260
da Silva, S.G. & Tehrani, J.J. (2016) Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales. Royal Society Open Science 3. doi: 10.1098/rsos.150645
Veenendaal, E.M. et al. (2015) Structural, physiognomic and above-ground biomass variation in savanna-forest transition zones on three continents – how different are co-occurring savanna and forest formations? Biogeosciences 12, 2927-2951. doi: 10.5194/bg-12-2927-2015
Zoe and William just after the graduation ceremony (UvA)
Two students (Zoe van Kemenade and Tessa Driessen) have recently completed projects looking at past environmental change on Samoa working in the Research Group of Palaeoecology & Landscape Ecology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Zoe’s project, part of her BSc Future Planet Studies (major Earth Sciences) at UvA, was entitled “A multi‐proxy analysis on the effect of climate and human activity on the environment of Samoa during the Holocene” and investigated charcoal, macro-fossils, and algae. Tessa’s project, “Biodiversity, fire and human dynamics on Samoa over the last 9200 years”, was completed as an internship during her MSc in Environmental Biology at Utrecht University (UU) that was co-supervised by Rike Wagner-Cremer. Tessa focused on the fossil pollen record to reconstruct past vegetation change. Both projects were conducted in cooperation with Jon Hassel and David Sear (both University of Southampton) who provided access to the Samoan sediments; for more on the Southampton Pacific Islands projects check out their blog Palaeoenvironmental Laboratory at the University of Southampton.
The results from both projects, and work by the University of Southampton team, will be presented at this years GTO conference (European conference of tropical ecology) in Gottingen next week.
William giving his personal view on the work of Tessa at her gradation ceremony (UU)
The British Ecological Society (BES) awards grants for “Research”, “Training and Travel”, “Ecologists in Africa”, and “Outreach”. Funding for individual grants is up to GBP 20,000. I am therefore delighted to announce that “palaeoecology” has been added to the list of categories under which funding can be applied for. For further details click here.
In the light of this change I would like to encourage palaeoecologists to:
Join the BES,
Join the BES peer review college, and
Apply for BES grants!
To register and apply to join the BES peer review committee or for a grant click here.
Miller, C.S. (2014) 520,000 years of environmental change in West Africa. PhD Thesis, Department of Environment, Earth & Ecosystems, The Open University.
Han, F., Rydin, C., Bolinder, K., Dupont-Nivet, G., Abels, H.A., Koutsodendris, A., Zhang, K. & Hoorn, C. (2016) Steppe development on the Northern Tibetan Plateau inferred from Paleogene ephedroid pollen. Grana 55, 71-100. doi: 10.1080/00173134.2015.1120343
First of all, I would like to clarify that the next post is just my personal opinion, not related to any institution or colleague involved in my research. Spoiler alert: there is nothing written here that I have not commented with any research colleague, don’t expect to find here any revelation. However, it is hard to believe the scarcity of notes published about this topic from the people who suffer it, making more difficult to find comprehension outside the scientific community, and even sometimes from inside.
This morning, a friend that works in the European Commission in Brussels has congratulated me because it seems that today (11th February) is the International Day of Women in Science. Well, it is a completely valid congratulation as I am a woman and I work in science. I am also aware that making an international day of pretty much anything is a very fashionable thing to do nowadays. However, besides honouring past figures, I am not really sure what this celebration is about and I would like to express my personal opinion on the subject. Moreover, this piece has a particular focus on my own experience of science in my country of origin, Spain.
Day 2 of the NAEM breakfast 07:30, first lectures at 08:30… Two keynotes today thinking about ecological stoichiometry the first by Stan Harpole (Martin-Luther-Universitat-Halle-Wittenberg) focused on resource ratio theory, and then Martin Wassen (Utrecht University) thinking about N and P limitations. I also attended, parts of, three sessions today “Linkages between fire, vegetation, soil and ecosystem services”, “Novel ecosystems”, and “Scaling from trait to environment and back”. My top talks for today were:
Elmar Veenendaal (Wageningen University) Fire effects on tropical woody vegetation structure have been exaggerated? Working on long-term fire study plots (Kokondekro since 1932) suggest that for forest-savannah transition zones fire alone is insufficient to mediate a change between states; human manipulation of ecosystems is required as well to trigger the change.
Frank van Langevelde (Wageningen University) Feedbacks between fire and patches of woody vegetation in tropical grassland savannah Examination of tree distributions and fire within the Kruger National Park shows that landscapes contain more clustered tree populations when fire frequency is higher.
Plus today I have done lots of talking and made many new contacts. I have lots of follow up emails to write and promised papers to send around! Overall this has been a super meeting for meeting people – perfect for expanding my network of Dutch based ecologists – in a nice location, with good food and beer. Looking forward to next year already.
Next to La Meuse river, near the villages of Welland Aijen, there is a large archaeological site with a long history of human occupation, including the remains of a large Mesolithic hunter gatherer community (see Marion Zijlema article for more details) The history of the site is deeply linked to the expansion and flooding of the river. In collaboration with archaeologists (Hanneke Bos) four UvA bachelor students are going to study the fossil pollen, phytoliths and charcoal from the Well-Aijen site to captured the environmental change that accompanied the human occupation. Yesterday (20 January – WDG late uploading post, sorry!) we visited the site to see what it was like, and to test out some equipment!
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We decided to bring out the Livingstone corer (Geo-core), which is usually used from a boat in a lake (e.g. Lake Erazo), to test its capacities on terrestrial sediment. Knowing that the peat formation was not deep below and given that the corer-system gives a nice continuous record, it seemed worthy of giving it a try. We ended up learning a lot about how the corer functions and about problem solving in the field – almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. We really fought for every centimeter of sample! The team never suffered from low spirits though, despite it all. With jokes and hot tea on site we ended up having a very fun and insightful expedition. Any remaining low morale or cold feet quickly faded by the sight of pie at the end of the day.
The annual Dutch ecology conference is being held over two days at the in “remote” Lunteren and I am pleased to be able to attend all of the conference this year. The conference was kicked off this morning with a recognition that this year is 150 years since the birth of ecology as a science (Haeckel, 1866). The opening two keynotes focused on aspects of ecology which have sometimes been overlooked firstly, parasitism (Peter Hudson, Penn State University) and secondly, immunology (Irene Tieleman, University of Groningen). Following these I focused on just two sessions in the morning “linking diversity to function”, and in the afternoon “ecosystem cascades”. From the range of excellent talks in the sessions I have picked one from each as my favourite:
Masha van der Sande (Wageningen University) The role of biodiversity and environment on productivity in tropical forests; evidence across scales By examining long-term tropical forest monitoring data van der Sande demonstrated that through time ecosystem traits changed significantly. She hypothesised that the lack of stability in ecosystem traits was due to past disturbance; although it is unclear what caused this disturbance (climate or humans), or when it occurred.
Dries Kuijper (Mammal Research Institute, Poland) Landscapes of fear in Europe: Wolves and humans shaping ungulate top-down effects By tracking Wolf pack distributions in the Bialowieza forest (Poland) Kuijpershowed that ungulates avoided Wolf pack “core areas” for fear of predation, that the exclusion of ungulates lead to reduced browsing of the vegetation, and so consequently forests regenerated faster in Wolf pack core areas.
The evening lecture was given by Bart Knols (in2care) who gave an impassioned talk on the importance of communicating science beyond the academic sphere. Arguing that now is the time for ecologists to have an influence on policy making, politics and business, as well as showing us how he has done this.
Ecology of the past 