News articles:

Unesco to rule on Tasmania forest and Great Barrier Reef, BBC News Asia.

Climate change will ‘cost world far more than estimated’, by Tom Bawden, The Independent.

Scientific articles:

Heslop-Harrison, J. (1979) Aspects of the structure, cytochemistry and germination of the pollen of Rye (Secale cereale L.). Annals of Botany, 44, 1-47.
Summary (Adele): Sometimes, the old ones are the best, and this behemoth of a paper contains a huge amount of useful information on the chemical structure and development of Rye pollen grains. As I am working on the chemistry of grass pollen at the moment, it is incredibly useful to know that this sort of information exists and can be used to inform both my experimental protocol and interpretations.

Michelutti, N., Blais, J.M., Cumming, B.F., Paterson, A.M., Rühland, K., Wolfe, A.P. & Smol, J.P. (2010) Do spectrally inferred determinations of chlorophyll a reflect trends in lake trophic status? Journal of Paleolimnology, 43, 205-217. doi: 10.1007/s10933-009-9325-8
Summary (Frazer): Quick and easy way to extract data from lake sediment cores.

Rossetti, D.F., de Toledo, P.M and Góes, A.M. (2005) New geological framework for Western Amazonia (Brazil) and implications for biogeography and evolution. Quaternary Research, 63, 78 – 89. doi: 10.1016/j.ygres.2004.10.001.
Summary (Hayley): Research discussing the importance of understanding the underlying geological processes in order to correctly identify the mechanisms controlling modern biodiversity in Western Amazonia, Brazil.

Simpson, J. (2011) On the Ambiguity of Elves. Folklore, 122, 76-83. DOI: 10.1080/0015587X.2011.537133
Summary (Will): Elves depicted in modern literature have a grounding in ancient literature.

Trenkamp, R., Kellogg, J. N., Freymueller, J.T. and Mora, H.P. (2002) Wide plate margin deformation, southern Central America and northwestern South America, CASA GPS observations. Journal of South American Earth Sciences. 15, 157 – 171. PIL: S0895-9811(02)00018-4.
Summary (Hayley): GPS data used to detect plate boundary convergence, subduction and collision within the north west of South America. GPS data between 1991 and 1998 was used to work out rates of movement for plates.

NERC-PlanetEarth

Insects, sediment and climate change

Frazer Bird and William Gosling talk about how to conduct palaeoecological research in the tropics for NERC’s Planet Earth pod-cast. Click here to here to listen to the conversation.

For other similar stories online visit the Planet Earth website.

Newspaper articles:

Exclusive: Found after 500 years, the wreck of Christopher Columbus’s flagship the Santa Maria by David Keys, The Independent.

Scientific articles:

Cole, L.E.S., Bhagwat, S.A. & Willis, K.J. (2014) Recovery and resilience of tropical forests after disturbance. Nat Commun, 5, Article number 3906.
Summary (Will): Varying factors have disturbed tropical forests which have recovered at varying rates.

Hoorn, C., Wesselingh, F.P., ter Steege, H., Bermudez, M.A., Mora, A., Sevink, J., Sanmartín, I., Sanchez-Meseguer, A., Anderson, C.L., Figueiredo, J.P., Jaramillo, C., Riff, D., Negri, F.R., Hooghiemstra, H., Lundberg, J., Stadler, T., Särkinen, T. & Antonelli, A. (2010) Amazonia Through Time: Andean Uplift, Climate Change, Landscape Evolution, and Biodiversity. Science, 330, 927-931.

Montade, V., Ledru, M.-P., Burte, J., Martins, E.S.P.R., Verola, C.F., Costa, I.R.d. & Magalhães e Silva, F.H. (2014) Stability of a Neotropical microrefugium during climatic instability. Journal of Biogeography, 41, 1215-1226.
SUMMARY (Will): Thoughts on what happened to species when in Amazonia.

African ecology in context

May 14, 2014
WDG

afqua-logo-header-copy

I am delighted to be organizing a focus session at the first AfQUA meeting. The session seeks to bring together ecologists and palaeoecologists working in Africa. If you are interested in getting involved please contact me (William Gosling) directly. For further information on the conference visit the AfQUA website or twitter feed.

Focus session 1: African ecology in context
The African continent spans over 80 degrees of latitude, nearly 6000 m of altitude and around 30 million km2 consequently it contains a vast array of unique ecosystems. Many of the African ecosystems are under direct pressure from human activity and are threatened by on-going and projected climate change. However, management and conservation of the modern African ecosystems is hampered by a paucity of data on their natural history. Studies of observations of ecosystems spanning >30 years are rare so we are heavily reliant on examination of the fossil record to place modern ecology in a long-term (>50 year) context. Information on past ecosystems can be extracted through the examination of a range of biological indicators (e.g. pollen, carbon isotopes, charcoal) found within marine and lake sediments. However, interpretation of the sediments and the proxies they contain with the ecosystems observed today is challenging because of timescale and interpretation issues. The aim of this session is to bring together modern ecologists and paleo-ecologists working in Africa to present the state-of-the-art understanding of ecosystems past and present, and explore how we can improve understanding of timescales and proxy interpretation to place these threatened ecosystems in context.

One short story and five scientific papers thinking about different aspects of ecological change through time.

Chekhov in 1889

Chekhov in 1889 (http://tinyurl.com/ny2msd9)

Short story:

Checkhov, A. (1889) The Pipe

SUMMARY (Will): People have long been concerned about environmental change. Observations of phenological shifts, degradation of ecosystem services and climate change are clearly presented in Checkhov’s “The Pipe” (1889).The key difference is today we have a better idea of why these things are happening!?

Scientific papers:

Garcia, R.A., Cabeza, M., Rahbek, C. & Araújo, M.B. (2014) Multiple dimensions of climate change and their implications for biodiversity. Science 344 1247579
SUMMARY (Phil): This review highlights the alternative metrics used to quantify climate change at different spatial scales, each with its own set of threats and opportunities for biodiversity. It’s a very relevant paper for palaeoecologists, with implications for how we think about climatic estimates we generate, how we interpret ecological shifts in the assemblages we study, and for demonstrating the importance thinking spatially as well as temporally. It also shows how important palaeoecological data is for setting baselines and putting projected climatic change into context.

Garzón-Orduña, I.J., Benetti-Longhini, J.E. & Brower, A.V.Z. (2014) Timing the diversification of the Amazonian biota: butterfly divergences are consistent with Pleistocene refugia. Journal of Biogeography, early online.
SUMMARY (Will): Butterfly species diverged in the Neotropics during the Pleistocene (probably).

Mitchard, E.T.A. et al. (2014) Markedly divergent estimates of Amazon forest carbon density from ground plots and satellites. Global Ecology and Biogeography, early online.
SUMMARY (Will): It is difficult to work out how much carbon is in a tropical forest.

Stansell, N.D., Polissar, P.J., Abbott, M.B., Bezada, M., Steinmann, B.A. and Braun, C. (2014) Proglacial lake sediment records reveal Holocene climate changes in the Venezuelan Andes. Quaternary Science Reviews. 89, 44 – 55.
SUMMARY (Hayley): A study of three lake sediment records in the Venezuelan Andes to look at patterns of glacial variability, and how glaciers might have responded to changing climatic conditions during the last c. 12,000 years.

Still, C.J., Foster, P.N. & Schneider, S.H. (1999) Simulating the effects of climate change on tropical montane cloud forests. Nature, 398, 608–610.
SUMMARY (Nick): The paper attempts to model the impact of climate change on a number of cloud forests around the world by simulating atmospheric parameters at the last glacial maximum (LGM) and at twice today’s CO2 level. The models agrees with palaeoecological data of a downslope migration of the cloud forest at the LGM, while the 2xCO2 model shows reduced cloud cover and increased evapotranspiration, which results in a significant reduction in cloud forest supporting land area.

BES Tropical Ecology Meeting

April 23, 2014
WDG

The 7th Early Career Research meeting 2014

The University of York, August 14th and 15th 2014

Tropical ecosystems – from process to policy

SIG_TropEcol_final-300x214Keynote speakers:

After six successful meetings, the legendary BES-TEG Early Career Research Meeting returns. Day one will focus on Ecology and Ecosystem Processes, while day two will focus on Practical Applications and links to Policy such as conservation, livelihood, policy and development.

All early-career researchers, both PhD and Post-Docs, are welcome to present their tropical ecology related research with a poster and/or oral presentation. There shall be a competition for both with prizes. This event will take place at Derwent College (D/L//047) and the accommodation at Alcuin College (see map link below).

Continue Reading

Highlights of articles members of the group read recently.

Newspaper articles:

The natural historian faces extinction: Overspecialism and funding cuts could end a vital scientific tradition, claim experts by Joe Kavanagh in The Independent

Fires could turn Amazon rainforest into a desert as human activity and climate change threaten ‘lungs of the world’, says study by Steve Connor in The Independent.

Linked to this article:

Scientific papers:

Giesecke, T., Ammann, B. and Brande, A. (2014) Palynological richness and evenness: insights from the taxa accumulation curve. Vegetation history and archaeobotany. 32, 217 – 228.

SUMMARY (Hayley): “A new method is presented on splitting the log – transformed taxa accumulation curve into sections (natural breaks where the curve deviates from a linear trend), with the hypothesis that breaks in the curve could indicate shifts in abundance between high (e.g. wind pollinated taxa) and low producers of pollen (e.g. insect pollinated taxa), this hypothesis is tested on pollen diagrams from three separate pollen diagrams from varying landscapes.”

Katifori, E., Alben, S., Cerda, E., Nelson, D.R. & Dumais, J. (2010) Foldable structures and the natural design of pollen grains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107, 7635-7639.

SUMMARY (Adele): “This elegant paper highlights the changeability of pollen grains and their responses to their environment, giving those of us who identify pollen based on morphological characteristics plenty to think about.”

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