Ecology of the Past blog contributor Nina Witteveen was awarded the Hugo de Vries prize on 13 June 2025 at the Botanic Gardens in Nijmegen. The Hugo de Vries prize is awarded by the KNbv (Royal Dutch Botanical Society) and the Stichting Hugo de Vries fonds (Hugo de Vries foundation) for the best PhD thesis in Botany defended at a Dutch University. This years prize was awarded to Nina for her thesis“Long-term Forest Recovery in Amazonia: Insights from Phytolith Analysis” (University of Amsterdam) which was completed under the supervision of Crystal McMichael.
36th Annual Meeting of the Society for Tropical Ecology
24-28 February 2025, Amsterdam
The 8th European Conference of Tropical Ecology took place in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) from 24 to 28 February 2025. This meeting was organized for the Society for Tropical Ecology. The event was hosted by the Institute for Biodiversity & Ecosystem Dynamics (University of Amsterdam), held at Hotel Casa, and the main sponsor was the NWO (Dutch Science Foundation).
During the conference around 250 scientists delivered 150 oral and 69 poster presentations. The science spanned the full breadth of tropical ecology, ranging from interactions of coral dwelling crabs, through carbon cycling dynamics in forests, to the governance of hunting activity. The six keynote speakers were paired under three topics “Human legacies in the tropics”, “Tropical ecosystem dynamics”, and “Protecting tropical ecosystems”. Within each topic we invited a senior scientist and a ‘rising star’ to provide their perspective on a particularly hot-button issue. If you want to find out more about what was presented all the abstracts are now published, open access, in the Society for Tropical Ecology’s journal Ecotropica.
Open access: Gosling, W.D. & McMichael, C.N.H., eds. (2025) Time for tropical ecology: Abstracts of the 8th European Conference of Tropical Ecology, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; 24.-28.2.2025. The Society for Tropical Ecology, Ecotropica, 26 (1-2): 1-222. https://doi.org/10.30427/ECOTROP202501
As part of my MSc Biological Sciences research project at the University of Amsterdam I travelled to Africa, where I first presented the early findings of my research at the SASQUA congress (blog post 1) in Oudtshoorn (Western cape), before heading to the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (blog post 2). Here I met up with local experts and prepared for the upcoming fieldwork, which the previous parts of this blog series covered. Now, the time has come for the final and best part, about my fieldwork in the absolutely gorgeous Drakensberg mountains.
Aims: As the samples for my research had already been collected earlier by my supervisors Prof. Dr. Jemma Finch & Prof. Dr. Trevor Hill for the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, our initial goal was to collect various samples (charcoal, sediment cores, etc) for the next students. During my time at the university of Kwa-Zulu natal, however, we realized that it would be great to collect a bunch of C3 and C4 grass species, to extract phytoliths (amorphous silica particles formed in plant tissues) from, which would help with the interpretation of our data. This then became our new focus. To achieve this goal we visited the Drakensberg twice, one day trip in the weekend, and one trip with an overnight stay.
Day 1
After a night of utterly terrible sleep (I was alone on the AirBnB property, the gate did not lock due to the cold, and our dogs started barking at something (someone!?) at 2AM), I woke up at 6AM to get ready for the long day ahead of us. Jemma came to pick me up at the, bringing coffee with her, which I really appreciated. We then picked up Trevor at their place and began our drive towards the mountains. I had not seen much of the landscape in the Kwa-Zulu Natal province, which turned out to be very compared to the Western Cape. Whereas the western cape had fynbos vegetation (very similar to the Mediterranean, KZN was more savanna like. There was grass everywhere the eye could see, except for the patches of spruce, planted by humans. Halfway through the drive the Drakensberg mountains came into view, which was stunning. We then drove through some small villages, until we finally arrived at the Berg.
I am Rebecca Lellau, a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (MPI-GEA) supervised by Dr. S. Yoshi Maezumi (https://www.shh.mpg.de/person/123125/2164017) and Professor Will D. Gosling. For my work I will use geochemical, palynological and charcoal proxy data from sediment cores from Curaçao to examine the long-term human-environment interactions.
In this blog post, I would like to share with you my first trip to a conference abroad – the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology (IACA) congress, which was also my first stay in the Caribbean in general.
During the seminar afternoon (17 October) we heard four talks. The first from Harm Smeenge and Ariët Kieskamp (both Bosgroep) introduced the sites we were to visit on the excursion the next day. This focused on the landscape ecology and ecological history of the bogs on the eastern slopes of the Veluwe. The second talk, by Roy van Beek (Wageningen University & Research), focused on the Celtic field systems around the Veluwe. He explained the latest archaeological and archaeobotaincal work investigating the age and origins of these field systems. The third presentation was by Jasper Candel (Wageningen University & Research) and focused on the geomorphological features from glacial activity in the Veluwe region and how this has effected the development of mire ecosystems. I (William Gosling) gave the final talk, presenting the outputs of the research theses of Sanna Wessel, Chiara Raino and Roos Dik who all completed projects at the University of Amsterdam and worked together to investigate how different mega-herbivore populations in the Dutch landscape were represented by the dung fungal spores preserved in the soil.
INQUA fellow Alfred Hougnon continues his research into past environmental change in the Dahomey Gap (Benin). In the fourth video documenting his progress a short background to the project, and insights into field work, are given. Field work took place near the Ewe-Adakplame forest in the south east of Benin and involved the recovery of sediments using a Russian corer. The video also shows how interactions and engagement with the local community was developed during the research expedition.
To find out more above Alfreds project read posts on:
After visiting the SASQUA conference and presenting my work there (see SASQUA Conference post), we travelled to the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in Pietermaritzburg (UKZN), where I would be staying for three weeks. During this period, my goal was to meet with local experts and to visit my site of study in the Drakensberg mountains. This would help me gain more insight into the environment I’m studying and provide me with an opportunity to collect more samples.
Pietermaritzburg
After the SASQUA congress finished, we flew from Port-Elisabeth to Durban. This would be my first time in one of the highly urbanised parts of South-Africa. We drove about an hour from Durban to Pietermaritzburg, better known locally as PMB, and I immediately noticed the stark difference between the countryside of the Western cape and the urbanised areas of Kwa-Zulu Natal. The city was rough around the edges and felt generally less safe than the laid-back countryside. Luckily, my accommodation was located in one of the better neighbourhoods close to campus. Macho the adorable dog of the AirBnB owners further assured my feeling of safety.
During the Mapping Ancient Africa writing workshop in Kenya (3-6 June 2024) Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr conducted a series of short interviews with the scientists attending. Below you can find part 2 (of 2) of the interviews with the participants in the workshop. Watch the videos to find out their scientific stories and top tips for academic writing. Watch all the Mapping Ancient Africa videos on the Mapping Ancient Africa YouTube Playlist.
The participants (part 2 of 2)
Ruth Kiely (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Husna Mashaka (Arizona State University, USA & National Museums of Kenya, Kenya)
During the Mapping Ancient Africa writing workshop in Kenya (3-6 June 2024) Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr conducted a series of short interviews with the scientists attending. During the interviews she asked the participants and instructors to describe their scientific background, what had motivated them to take part in the writing workshop, and what they thought the most important thing they had gained from it. You can now meet the first four of these scientists now by watching the videos below, or catch up with all the latest videos on the Mapping Ancient Africa YouTube Playlist.
The participants (part 1 of 2)
Olugbenga Boboye (University of Ibadan, Nigeria)
Angela Effiom (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)
Ecology of the past 