Online resources | Ecology of the past

Mapping Ancient Africa: Video of seminar 17

May 17, 2024
WDG

The 17th online Mapping Ancient Africa seminar took place on Thursday 16 May 2024. The seminar was delivered by N’dji dit Jacques Dembele and was entitled “Evidence of recent seismicity in the West African Craton: The Bamako seisemites Mali”. In the seminar surprising new evidence for Quaternary seismic activity within the West African Craton – which was thought to be tectonically stable – was presented. Specifically, the identification of clastic dykes and deformation within sedimentary and lacustrine deposits was used to suggest past high magnitude earth quakes in the last 170,000 years.

Details of this seminar can be found here. You can find more Mapping Ancient Africa seminar videos on the “Ecology of the Past” YouTube channel.

INQUA Fellowship Journey: Alfred Houngnon

May 16, 2024
WDG

Alfred Houngnon was awarded an INQUA Fellowship in 2024 to develop his work on past environmental change in the Dahomey Gap (western Africa). Through the project Alfred is making a series of videos about his fellowship journey. In the first video Alfred introduced his project and collaborators (click here to watch the first part). In the two latest instalments (below) Alfred explains: (i) one of his key methodological approaches (modern pollen trapping), and (ii) the modern vegetation of the region and current threats to the vegetation.

To watch more videos about past environmental change visit the Ecology of the Past YouTube channel.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Video of seminar 16

April 15, 2024
WDG

The 16th Mapping Ancient Africa seminar took place online on Friday 12th April 2024. The seminar was delivered by Stéphanie Bodin (Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt). In the seminar Stéphanie demonstrated how the examination of ancient charcoals found in caves used for shelter by hunter-gather populations living in Ethiopia at the end of the African Humid Period (4,000-2,000 years ago) can provide insights into vegetation and human selection of woody resources.

Details of this seminar can be found here. You can find more Mapping Ancient Africa seminar videos on the “Ecology of the Past” YouTube channel.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Video of seminar 15

March 26, 2024
WDG

The 15th Mapping Ancient Africa seminar took place online on Friday 15th March 2024. The seminar was delivered by Bruk Lemma (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany; Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute – EBI). In the seminar Bruk presented recent advances made in the application of biomarker and stable isotope techniques in revealing the climate dynamics of the Bale Mountains in Ethiopia. He showed that it is possible to identify some plant types using these approaches, but that degradation of the signal in the sedimentary environment is possible.

Details of this seminar can be found here. You can find more Mapping Ancient Africa seminar videos on the “Ecology of the Past” YouTube channel.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Video of seminar 14

February 29, 2024
WDG

The 14th Mapping Ancient Africa seminar took place on Thursday 28th February 2024. The seminar was delivered by Mathias Vinnepand (Leibniz-Institute for Applied Geophysics Hannover, Germany) and presented recent advances in developing a chronology for the Lake Bosumtwi sediment record over the last c. 1 million years.

Details of this seminar can be found here. You can find more Mapping Ancient Africa seminar videos on the “Ecology of the Past” YouTube channel.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Video of Seminar 10

January 12, 2024
WDG

The 10th Mapping Ancient Africa seminar took place on Tuesday 7th February 2023. The seminar was delivered by Cecile Blanchet (Helmholtz-Zentrum Potsdam) and highlighted recent work linking river sediments from the Nile with change in global climate systems, including El Nino.

Details of this seminar can be found here. You can find more Mapping Ancient Africa seminar videos on the “Ecology of the Past” YouTube channel.

References

Blanchet, C.L., Osborne, A.H., Tjallingii, R., Ehrmann, W., Friedrich, T., Timmermann, A., Brückmann, W. & Frank, M. (2021) Drivers of river reactivation in North Africa during the last glacial cycle. Nature Geoscience 14, 97-103. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-00671-3
Blanchet, C.L., Tjallingii, R., Schleicher, A.M., Schouten, S., Frank, M. & Brauer, A. (2021) Deoxygenation dynamics on the western Nile deep-sea fan during sapropel S1 from seasonal to millennial timescales. Climate of the Past 17, 1025-1050. DOI: 10.5194/cp-17-1025-2021
Blanchet, C.L., Ionita, M., Ramisch, A., Tjallingii, R., Brauer, A., Laruelle, L., Bagge, M. & Klemann, V. (2023) Pacemakers of extreme floods during warmer and wetter climates of the “Wild Nile” stage. PREPRINT (Version 1) available at Research Square DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3051876/v1

INQUA Fellowship Award: Alfred Houngnon

December 20, 2023
WDG

I am delighted to be able to report that Alfred Houngnon (University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin) has been awarded an INQUA Fellowship for 2024 to develop his research into past environmental change in the Dahomey Gap. This research will link up my laboratory, at the Institute of Biodiversity & Ecosystem Dynamics (University of Amsterdam), and the group of Dr Mireille S.S. Toyi (Laboratory of Applied Ecology, University of Abomey-Calavi). Below, and in the associated video report, Alfred explains the project and what he hopes to achieve during the project.

The Dahomey Gap project is designed to gain new insights on the West African palaeoenvironments using pollen, charcoal and dung fungal spore records to reconstruct past vegetation, fire and animal abundances. These empirical data will then be compared against paleoclimate models. Specifically, we will explore the interactions between fire, animals and vegetation around the Ewe-Adakplame forest in the south east of Benin Republic and highlight the role humans would have previously played in the modification of the landscape for millennia.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Structuring a scientific article

December 19, 2023
WDG

The Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) project is currently (late 2023 until early 2024) in the process of collecting submissions for a special issue of the INQUA (our sponsors) journal Quaternary International. The special issue will showcase research developed at the MAA workshop in Rome, and presented at the MAA sessions at the INQUA Rome congress. However, the editorial team is open to considering manuscripts relevant to the MAA goals that come from people not already involved in the project – so please contact us if you have ideas.

The process of developing articles for the special issue will be supported by the MAA community through a series of events. The first of these was a online workshop (2 October 2023) set out the frame of reference for the special issue, and included a short presentation on tips for structing a scientific article for this journal. If you missed the event and are thinking about writing an article for the special issue, or in a similar style, you can catch up with this on the Ecology of the Past YouTube channel. In person writing workshops are planned for 2024 in Africa. As full details emerge information will be published here.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Scientists (part 3)

September 1, 2023
WDG

The third instalment of interviews with Mapping Ancient Africa scientists is now available. Watch ‘the final four’ below, and check out the other videos by clicking on the names below:

Interview 10: Markus Fisher (University of Potsdam)

Interview 11: Soléne Boisard (University of Montréal) – in French

Interview 12: Trevor Hill (University of KwaZulu-Natal)

Interview 13: Jemma Finch (University of KwaZulu-Natal)

To find out more about the Mapping Ancient Africa project click here.

Mapping Ancient Africa: Scientists (part 2)

August 28, 2023
WDG

The next four interviews with scientists who participated in the Mapping Ancient Africa workshop in Rome (2023) are now online (see below). You can find more interviews with scientists by clicking the names below:

Interview 6: Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr (Free University of Berlin)

Interview 7: Mathais Vinnepand (Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz)

Interview 8: Rahab Kinyanjui (National Museums of Kenya & Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology)

Interview 9: Manu Chevalier (University of Bonn)

To check out all the Mapping Ancient Africa video content visit out the Ecology of the Past YouTube channel.

To find out more about the MAA Rome workshop follow links from here.