Hello! I’m Adele and I started my PhD about a week ago. It’s been a little intense but I can almost find the lab without a map now, so it is probably time to introduce myself.
I’ll be studying pollen-vegetation relationships in Ghana, as part of the NERC funded project ‘500,000 years of solar irradiance, climate and vegetation changes’. This means I’ll be using pollen traps to figure out how pollen outputs vary between (and sometimes within) different vegetation types in Ghana. I will also be trying my hand at chemotaxonomy and video making. I’m heading out to Ghana (along with Phil Jardine) in just over a week to do my first lot of field work which will involve seeing the plots, collecting existing traps, replacing them with new ones, and setting up some new sites. I’m very excited.
Hayley Keen: “Continual pollen counting, second lot of Argon dating done, and first set of wood macrofossils back and ready for identification!”
Frazer Bird: “At the start of September I began working as a technician as part of Encarni’s project. I am looking at the midges from the core we collected together on our last field trip. Things are going well, although the midges are hard to find in the older sections the preservation in early sequences is great. The resolution of this core looks to be fantastic also so and hopefully we will get some interesting results when we compare all the proxies. Away fromthe lab I presented at INTECOL 2013 in London, The talk seemed to go down well and was noted as highly commended by the judging panel. Great publicity all round for the midges!!!”
Bryan Valencia: Has been on field work in Peru during this time he presented a talk on climate change to the Asociación para la Conservación de la Cuenca Amazónica, and gave interviews to local journalists and two TV stations. He also collected sediments from two locations, and manged to obtain a new US visa. He is now working on the final stages of submitting his thesis.
Phil Jardine: Phil has been busy ordering in microscopes and other equipment for the Lake Bosumtwi project (the first of which arrived today), and setting up the trip to Ghana that he’ll be going on with new PhD student Adele Julier in late October. He’s also been attempting to learn more about geochemistry, which has proved challenging.
Lake Pindo: We have finally the results of 6 samples radiocarbon dated from NRCF through our collaborator Dr Pauline Gulliver, and we have sent 4 more to “range find” the key interval of interests for the FORSENS project. We have started the midges’ analysis although it seems this going to be focused to the upper 4 meters of sediment. We would like to discern possible preservation issues in tropical records for this proxy. Some samples for a preliminary screening looking for diatoms ahve been collected and sent to the new FORSENS collaborator Teresa Vegas-Vilarrúbia. MS samples have been also collected for the first three drives and we hope to run this analysis next month.
Lake Banos: We have started the pollen prep. for the upper section of the record.
Management tasks: We are now ready for the tropical record Lake Marcacocha pollen prep., collaborating with an ongoing project lead by Alex Chepstow-Lusty. On a different topic, I have started the organisation of department seminars, so I would like to highlight if you have any potential speaker, please contact me.
Publications: a co-authorship in a paper published in Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics authored by Valentí Rull and his research group in the Botanical Institute of Barcelona is now available on line (click here)
William Gosling: “I have been promoted to Senior Lecturer (hooray),started work on the new level 2 environmental science module, been working on a new paper from the Erazo study site, and had a holiday!”
Will’s BES T-shirt logo swabbed at Greenman; for more microbes on festival kit visit the “Hall of shame” on http://www.besfest.org
August was a month for travel with PCRG members heading for Peru (Bryan, and he is still there), Greenman festival (William), INTECOL conference (William and Frazer), and the Royal Geographic Society annual meeting (William, Encarni, Frazer and Hayley). Detailed reports of the UK based travels are already on the blog, and hopefully we will get a post from Bryan on his Peruvian adventure once he is back.
Back in Milton Keynes work progressed with:
Hayley producing a revised full draft of her pollen counting methodology manuscript,
Frazer starting with the first tentative attempts to apply his chironomid training data set to fossil chironomid records,
Phil trialing inverted microscopes and training on the FTIR,
Encarni plotting field work in Ecuador (more travel for November-December),
My name’s Phil Jardine, and I’ve recently joined the Palaeoenvironmental Change Research Group as a post-doc, on the NERC-funded ‘500,000 years of solar irradiance, climate and vegetation changes’. For this project I’ll be analysing the chemistry of pollen grains from a 500,000 year long sediment record from Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana, with the aim of generating a long-term historical record of solar irradiance.
Before coming to the Open University I was based at the University of Birmingham, where I did PhD and post-doc research on North American pollen records from the early Palaeogene (~65 – 45 million years ago). For this work I was particularly interested in the role of climate in driving changes in plant communities, especially during a rapid global warming event 55 million years called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Having worked for some time now on pretty old material, I’m looking forward to researching something a bit more recent – if you can call the last 500,000 years recent – and going out to Ghana and looking at real, live, tropical plants.
If you would like to get in touch about the Lake Bosumtwi project, or something else pollen related, please feel free to get in touch.
Woodland resources in the high Andes have varied through the last 5000 years and influenced human societal development. The relationship between people and natural resources in the Andes is explored in the recently published Gosling & Williams (2013); http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1177/0959683613496296
In July we have managed to get a number of individual blog posts out so teaching activity on summer school, publications and conference reports have already been covered. Behind the scenes progress in the lab has continued despite the hot weather:
Frazer has commenced writing of his Chironomid training data set paper, and analysis of a fossil chironomid record.
Hayley has been plugging away at the analysis of pollen from Mera, and has got the first of her wood macrofossil samples prepared for thin sectioning (fingers crossed next month we may start to get some identifications on these!).
Lottie, Natalie and Bryan are keeping their supervisors very busy with reading material as they continue a pace with writing up.
Phil is setting up the Bosumtwi pollen chemistry project (we now have an offical grant code!) and is settling in; hopefully he should be moved down to MK very soon!
And Encarni is multi tasking and organising everything as usual 🙂
Earlier this month Rachel Gwynn (Geography, UCL) visited the PCRG to use our core splitter to reveal what was contained within two cores collected from the Carribean. She has also been kind enough to provide photos of the sediments and an insight into the story so far:
Sediments from Fresh Water Pond Barbuda (Photograph Rachel Gwynn)
Lake sediment cores covering the past few hundred to thousand years have been taken from two lakes, Wallywash Great Pond in Jamaica and Freshwater Pond in Barbuda. The sediments form part of the NERC-funded project Neotropics1k (PI Prof. Jonathan Holmes), which is concerned with climate variability in the northern Neotropics over the past millennium. The sediment cores show marked changes in composition and colour, from pale marl to dark organic mud. These colour changes, which are clearly visible in the photographs, represent changes in sediment composition that are in turn related to lake-level variations caused by long-term climate shifts. Deeper, open-water conditions under wetter climate are represented by the marls, whereas lowered lake levels, caused by direr climate, are associated with organic-rich sediments.
Wallywash Great Pond– core section W2
Thirteen separate units have been identified through the 1 m core length, varying between light coloured marl, dark organic and shelly sediments.
The abundance of preserved Ostracod valves increases throughout the marl and shell rich layers but drops significantly in the organic rich material.
Barbuda Freshwater Pond- core section FWP
This core has four distinct units. 0-23 cm is a calcareous mud with a diffused lower boundary into a shelly calcareous mud at 25-35.5 cm. 35.5-38 cm and 38-52 cm is two variations of calcareous mud.
These units, as with the W2 core, have been defined using a Munsel Soil Chart.
The Ostracod valves are thought to be abundant throughout the core due to the high marl content.
Wallywash Great Pond Jamaica (photograph Rachel Gwynn)
More regular type activities have also continued. Hayley is working on the protocol for thin sectioning wood here. Frazer is picking midges and becoming increasingly media savey. While Bryan, Lottie and Natalie are all writing theses!
Alex Barret (left) and Will Gosling (right) looking at a bucket of mud
Recently PCRG members helped Alex Barrett out extracting mud from a lake so that he had some sediments to play with for his freeze/thaw experiments. I return Alex has written us a short post on his PhD research project.
Metre scale Sorted patterned ground on Tindastóll, Northern Iceland. This circle is approximately 1.5 m across and consists of a fine domain made up of silt and gravel sized particles, surrounded by a coarse domain consisting of cobble to boulder sized material. It is part of a larger net which extends across large regions of the hilltop.
I am researching possible occurrences of sorted patterned ground on the Northern Plains of Mars. I am conducting experiments to try to simulate freeze thaw sorting in the lab, under both terrestrial and martian conditions. This requires the use of fine grained silts as these are known to be frost susceptible. Experiments will be conducted to see whether lenses of coherent ice can be formed in this soil, initially under earth like conditions, but later at much colder temperatures, using salts of the sort known to occur on mars to depress the freezing point. If ice lenses can be formed at temperatures entirely below 0oC then it would provide another strand of evidence that martian features with similar morphology to terrestrial periglacial sites could have formed though the same processes.
Dr Phil Jardine joining us from the University of Birmingham
We are pleased to announce the imminent arrival of three new PCRG members Phil Jardine, Adele Julier and Nicholas Loughlin. Phil and Adele will be working on the African based, NERC funded, “500,000 years of solar irradiance, climate and vegetation changes” project as PDRA and PhD student respectively. While Nick will be working on South American palaeoenvironmental records looking at “Tropical forests response to past global climate change” as a NERC/CEPSAR funded PhD student. Phil will start in the department on Monday and the others will arrive with the October PhD student intake… exciting times.
Ecology of the past 