December 20, 2021
#Openaccess #Teameffort
Gosling WD, Maezumi SY, Heijink BM, Nascimento MN, Raczka MF, van der Sande MT, Bush MB, McMichael CNH. 2021. Scarce fire activity in north and north-western Amazonian forests during the last 10,000 years. Plant Ecology & Diversity. DOI: 10.1080/17550874.2021.2008040
December 15, 2021
The second in my series highlighting papers in the recent volume of Palaeoecology of Africa (published entirely open access online) focuses on the research articles. The research articles make up the ‘guts’ of the volume, comprising 10 of the 24 papers. Three of these are from western Africa (Dinies et al.; Gosling et al.; Lemonnier & Lézine), two from eastern Africa (Githumbi et al.; Kinyanjui et al.), two from central Africa (Richards; Gaillard et al.), and three from southern Africa (Chevalier et al.; Hill & Finch, Hill et al.). These research articles present new data and key insights into past environmental change in Africa, which fall into two broad categories, providing information on: (i) how we can extract information from pollen data sets, and (ii) the processes operating to drive vegetation.
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December 2, 2021
The recently published volume of the Palaeoecology of Africa series contains a number of different types of papers: research articles, reviews, perspectives and data papers. One of the key reasons I was motivated to become involved in the project was to help mobilise palaeoecological data from Africa towards open access datasets (African Pollen Database, Neotoma). To hopefully get greater recognition to the great work done over the years and to help facilitate synthetic work that will provide a greater understanding of spatial variance in past climate change. Ultimately, four short data papers were included in the volume: an enhanced c. 16,000 year pollen record from the Bale Mountains in Ethiopia (Gil-Romera et al. 2021), two pollen and charcoal record from the southern Cape Coast in South Africa, c. 3200 and 650 years long respectively (du Plessis et al. 2021a; du Plessis et al. 2021b), and a c. 700 year long record from Madagascar (Razanatsoa et al. 2021). The records provide new insights in to landscape scale environmental change driven by both humans and climate. To find out more check out the open access articles and the data at:
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August 2, 2021
Maezumi SY, Gosling WD, Kirschner J, Chevalier M, Cornelissen HL, Heinecke T, McMichael CNH. 2021. A modern analogue matching approach to characterize fire temperatures and plant species from charcoal. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 578:110580. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2021.110580
June 2, 2021
Kaboth-Bahr S, Gosling WD, Vogelsang R, Bahr A, Scerri EML, Asrat A, Cohen AS, Düsing W, Foerster V, Lamb HF, et al. 2021. Paleo-ENSO influence on African environments and early modern humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(23):e2018277118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2018277118
May 19, 2021
Open access: Montoya E, Matthews-Bird F, Brooks SJ, Gosling WD. 2021. Forests protect aquatic communities from detrimental impact by volcanic deposits in the tropical Andes (Ecuador). Regional Environmental Change 21(2): article 53. DOI: 10.1007/s10113-021-01783-1
April 28, 2021
Open access:
Houngnon A, Adomou AC, Gosling WD, Adeonipekun PA. 2021. A checklist of vascular plants of Ewe-Adakplame Relic Forest in Benin, West Africa. PhytoKeys 175:151. https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.175.61467
March 25, 2021
Open access:
McMichael, C., Witteveen, N.H., Scholz, S., Zwier, M., Prins, M.A., Lougheed, B.C., Mothes, P. & Gosling, W.D. (2021) 30,000 years of landscape and vegetation dynamics in a mid-elevation Andean valley. Quaternary Science Reviews 258, 106866.
January 9, 2021
Open access:
McMichael, C.N., Heijink, B.M., Bush, M.B. & Gosling, W.D. (2020) On the scaling and standardization of charcoal data in paleofire reconstructions. Frontiers of Biogeography. https://doi.org/10.21425/F5FBG49431
November 13, 2020
Open access:
Teunissen van Manen, Milan L, Jansen, B., Cuesta, F., León-Yánez, S. & Gosling, W.D. (2020) From leaf to soil: n-alkane signal preservation, despite degradation along an environmental gradient in the tropical Andes. Biogeosciences Discussions 17, 5465–5487. https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-5465-2020
Ecology of the past 