Reports | Ecology of the past

6th Workshop on Non-Pollen Palynomorphs

July 9, 2014
encarnimontoya

OUR POSTER: Non-Pollen Palynomorphs in Ecuador: Starting from scratch

Tallinn University
18-20 June 2014

Last month I had the opportunity of attending the 3-days non-pollen palynomorphs (NPP) workshop that was held at the Tallinn University, Estonia. It was perfectly organised by Tiiu Koff and Egle Avi among other members of the university, as it was a join workshop of Cladocera remains (XII Subfossil Cladocera workshop; 16-18^th June) and NPP (18-20^th June). Unfortunately, I was just present in the NPP workshop, so my comments will be focus on it.

With around 40 participants, we greatly enjoyed the discussions that came up about the state-of-the-art of this broad and interesting proxy and its implications for archaeology, palaeolimnology, and different aspects of ecology like human landscape management, biodiversity and conservation, or community assemblages. Current methodological problems like taxonomy, standardisation of lab techniques, etc., were also debated.

Opening and key lectures were from Bas van Geel and Emilie Gauthier, showing the development of this discipline over the last 40 years, and a great example of multi-proxy project aimed to study the human arrival and impact in Greenland respectively. Besides oral and poster presentations, last day there was a microscope session, very useful for sharing knowledge and uncertainties! In our specific case, Will, Hayley and I contributed with a poster titled “Non-pollen palynomorphs in Ecuador: starting from scratch”.

Personally, among the things I most like from the NPP meetings is the friendly and close environment, where everyone is more than glad to help others, regardless the experience. Following this feeling of small and scattered group of people dealing with the same issues, we used to do a final remark session every workshop raising the advances and inconveniences found so far, updating our NPP papers repository (managed by Antonella Miola), and addressing future directions as a group (for instance, we have now our own project in ResearchGate, thanks to Lyudmila Shumilovskikh!). In this particular workshop, I was very happy when I found out that Tallinn University has a green policy (paper free), and they replaced book abstracts etc., by iPads to follow the workshop schedule.

Although these meetings are normally biannual, next conference location and date is yet to be decided, but we hope to have the chance to join this very friendly and supporting community again. In addition, there will be a NPP session in the next European Palaeobotany and Palynology congress, tobe held in University of Padova (Italy), next August 2014. We encourage people with all kind of experience (or lack of) to attend further events.

Macroecology workshop

April 9, 2014
encarnimontoya

Phil Jardine taking charge at the macro-ecology meeting

On 1^st April, Alice, Encarni, Hayley and Nick attended the joint British Ecological Society Macroecology Special Interest Group and Palaeontological Association workshop held in the Natural History Museum, called Challenges in Macroecology – Scaling the Time Barrier. The workshop was co-organised by our member Phil Jardine (jointly with Victoria Herridge, Adriana de Palma and Isabel Fenton), and it was a mix between deep and shallow time, neoecologists and other researchers interested in any kind of macroecology topics.

We enjoyed so much how this one-day meeting was scheduled, with some formal approach including four plenary and lighting talks, and other informal initiatives such as speed dating and discussion groups. This way, all participants could interact with other non-directly related researchers.

The focuses of the plenary talks were related to different fields within macroecology. In this sense:

Andy Purvis opened the session with the definition of macroecology, the trends and shifts of study topics it has carried out since the discipline began and ended with what macroecology is not any longer.
David Jablonski explored through examples of bivalves studies how climate in time and space affects the studies of diversity dynamics, mainly addressed to three key questions: a) Extinctions, b) Latitudinal Diversity Gradients, and c) Geographical ranges.
Lee Hsiang Liow encouraged us to evaluate both processes and observations, and highlighted the importance of modelling both to take into account the “unobservable” or latent truth including examples of capture-recapture and occupancy methods.
Kathy Willis gave a review of the trends followed for conservation strategies since 1980s, until the development of the “ecosystems services” idea of given an economic value to biodiversity. Her main statement was focused on how palaeo-data can help in providing information to some “knowledge gaps” related to human resources including: a) trends in biomass, b) trends in nutrient cycling, c) trends in in final ecosystems services, and d) sustainability of ecosystems services.

Lighting talks were related to more specific study cases of macroecology, including specific researches about turtles, fungi, beetles, crocodiles, foraminifera or dinosaurs, in several spatial and temporal scales .

We would like to thank again Phil, Victoria, Adriana and Isabel for the great day that finished with a nice and warm wine reception sponsored by BMC Ecology. We hope to attend further events like this soon.

For more on this meeting see blog post by @protohedgehog “Macroecology – scaling the time barrier” and storify of the twitter feed, click here.

Back to the future: using proxy data to assess environmental change

February 12, 2014
WDG

PCRG’s Frazer Bird gives a leture for schools in Milton Keynes as part of the CEPSAR Christmas Lecture series:

To find out more read Frazer’s blog post about his research.

Fieldwork in Ecuador 2013

December 13, 2013
WDG

Nick and Will with Carman (director of the Pindo Mirador biological station)

Three members of the PCRG (William Gosling, Encarni Montoya and Nick Loughlin) visited Ecuador (November-December 2013) to develop collaborations with Ecuadorian institutions, recover more lake sediments, and find new potential sites for projects. Below are some photos from:

Lake Pindo,
Lake Huila, and
Lake Erazo.

Full reports on specific aspects of the fieldwork to follow.

Continue Reading

Ghana field work: pollen traps, vegetation, lakes and horses!

November 13, 2013
WDG

Phil and Adele on horses in Ghana

Phil and Adele have survived field work in Ghana collecting pollen traps, looking at the vegetation, visiting Lake Bosumtwi and riding horses (!?) – hooray.

For full report and pictures visit Adele’s blog Plants in real life.

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual international conference – 2013

August 30, 2013
HayleyKeen

Palaeo-people at the RGS-IBG meeting plotting future papers and grants. Left-right: Encarni Montoya, Joe Williams, Hayley Keen and Frazer Bird.

RGS – IBG Annul International Conference 2013
27^th – 30^th August, London

Yesterday (29^th August) four members of the Palaeoenvironmental Change Research Group (PCRG) went down to London for the third day of the Royal Geographical Society with IBG (RGS – IBG) international conference for a day of informative talks. Two of the morning sessions were of particular interest to us with the sessions entitled ‘Human – environment interactions in the Neotropics: historical impact to current challenges’ organised by John Carson, Lizzy Rushton and Sarah Metcalfe.

Into the next 100 years

August 28, 2013
Bryan

Sex & Bugs & Rock n Roll at INTECOL: The BES sponsored tour of music festivals (http://www.besfest.org) landed at INTECOL. David Price from Science made Simple (http://www.sciencemadesimple.co.uk/) arrived on the Wednesday day afternoon to show what can be achived with professional science busking.

INTECOL 2013
18-23 August
ExCeL London

As a palaeoecologist when I came back to the UK from my post doc in Florida I started to get involved with the British Ecological Society (BES) so I could meet neoecologists. Eight years later I am still involved in the society and delighted that the theme of the society’s centenary celebration meeting focuses on change through time: Into the next 100 years. With 11 plenary lectures, dozens of parallel session, hundreds of posters and other activities including Pecha Kucha talks, workshops, field trips and trade stalls I will restrict my post to my thinking about the theme of timescales and the broader messages I got from the meeting.

BES Macroecology meeting

August 5, 2013
philjardine

BES Macroecology SIG

Last week I attended the annual meeting of the British Ecological Society Macroecology Special Interest Group (or BES Macroecology SIG for something a bit more manageable) at the University of Sheffield. Macroecology deals with ecological patterns and processes that occur over large spatial and temporal scales, and so is a natural fit for a lot of palaeoecological data.

The organisers deliberately moved away from the standard conference format of back-to-back talks, and instead built in lots of time for discussions around several themes (‘provacations’) that addressed the current status of macroecology and possible future directions for it. Several areas for progress were identified here, including finding more efficient ways of generating, curating and accessing large (global scale) datasets, increasing dialogue between numerical modellers and empirical ecologists, and more statistical and computational training for undergraduate ecologists and biologists.

Sessions of presentations were also formulated to encourage discussion and debate, with either rapid, five-minute presentations or longer methodological talks forming the starting point for further discourse. I struggled enormously with the five-minute time limit during my talk (conference talks are often built around a 15 minute slot) but hopefully interested a few people in the uses of 60 million year old pollen for addressing macroecological questions.

A workshop on ‘Spatial analysis in R’ followed the two-day meeting. This was taught by Barry Rowlingson, and was co-organised by the Macroecology and Computational Ecology SIGs. Barry started by introducing the programme R and then went on to demonstrate its uses for handling, mapping and analysing spatial data. This type of analysis was largely new to me, and this workshop was a brilliant introduction to what R can do with geographical data.

To join these British Ecological Society SIGs and find out about other groups visit the BES SIG pages by clicking here.

Sedimentary Rocks and Fossils in the Field

July 31, 2013
WDG

Students examining the sedimentary deposits at Howick Haven

SXG288 Practical science: Earth and environment
Sedimentary Rocks & Fossils in the Field
23-29 July 2013

Face-to-face teaching of practical skills in field geology is one of the most interesting and rewarding aspects of being a lecturer at The Open University. Over the last few days I have been lucky enough to participate in the running of the Sedimentary Rocks & Fossils in the Field topic within our second level Practical Science module (SXG288). This is one of two opportunities that students taking this module get to head into field, examine rocks, develop observational skills and test scientifc hypotheses; the other field based topic is Igneous & Metamorphic Rocks in the Field.

Sedimentary Rocks & Fossils is based from Longridge Towers School in Northumberland (whilst the regular students are away). Longridge provides the ideal base for this topic because of its close proximity to some world class sedimentary rock and fossil exposures. Over an intensive three day field experience students examine sedimentary deposits from the Silurian and Carboniferous exposed mainly along the Northumberland coast; however, this is not a simple guide to the geology of the region. The topic is founded on the principle of problem based learning and at each field location students are expected to make observations, record them accurately and interpret the past environment. Findings are consolidated and dicussed during evening lab sessions.

On the rocks at Scremerston

This year we were delighted to welcome >40 students, some of who flew in from abroad, to study this topic over two sessions. Given the positive feeback recieved so far I think all enjoyed the topic and gained important geological field skills (for evidence of this also see photos below). I wish them all luck in their future studies and hope that they continue to be interested in Earth Science and progress towards our Natural Science degree qualification.

For further photos see below, follow #SXG288 on twitter, or visit the SXG288 Facebook page.

Dead heads

July 30, 2013
encarnimontoya

12th International Workshop on Subfossils Chironomids
10-13th June, New Forest, UK

Last month Frazer and Encarni attended the 3-days “dead heads” workshop that was held at the Beaulieu Hotel , in the New Forest National Park (UK). It was perfectly organised by Pete Langdon and Steve Brooks, and was a great opportunity for both of us who are relatively new to the midges’ community. With around 40 participants from Europe, America and Asia, we greatly enjoyed the discussions that came up about the state-of-the-art for this interesting proxy and the implications for palaeoclimatology, palaeolimnology, and different aspects of ecology like conservation, restoration or community assemblages. In addition, useful topics such as current methodological problems with age-depth model uncertainties, the usefulness and limitations of transfer functions, and taxonomy were also debated.

Besides oral and poster presentations, the workshop offered several tutorials during the afternoons, key amoung these were an introduction to R carried out by Richard Telford and Steve Juggins, and taxonomic support for head capsules ID leaded by Steve Brooks and Oliver Heiri.

In our specific case, Frazer contributed with an oral presentation titled “Understanding the modern distributions and ecological tolerances of the Neotropical Chironomidae fauna: The potential as a palaeoecological proxy” base on his PhD research. We were both so glad to make contact with other people working in South America, in particular Julieta Massaferro and Alberto Araneda presented very interesting data from Argentina and Chile.