Reports | Ecology of the past

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.

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. We encourage people with all kind of experience (or lack of) to attend any further events.

Palaeo-Caribbean

July 30, 2013
WDG

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)

Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll – the trailer

June 29, 2013
WDG

PCRG members included in action with the British Ecological Society Roadies at Wychwood festival:

Video compiled by our very own Frazer Bird!

Check out the Roadies blog to find out which festivals we are coming to next!

Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n Roll – Wychwood

June 5, 2013
WDG

Playing the “Who’s poo” game at Wychwood Festival.

Group members William and Frazer took part in the first music festival outing of the British Ecological Society 100 year celebration “Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n Roll” at Wychwood (31 May – 3 June). Early reports suggest that over 900 people were “stickered” and around 100 people “swabbed” during the weekend. For full details of this event, and future activity, check out the blog and follow the BES Roadies on twitter @BESRoadies.

American tour: Biogeography meeting & Ecuador field work

February 26, 2013
Fray

PCRG COMPLETE AGAIN

I am glad to say that after almost two months out of the office running around with 8 bags of equipment, Frazer and I have finished our tour of the Americas. As the work has been so diverse, we would like to split our comments and impressions into two different posts, we hope you enjoy them!

Palynologishe Kring

January 9, 2013
WDG

Prof. H. Hoogiemstra Chair of Palaeoecology & Landscape ecology at IBED

Dutch and Belgian Palynology meeting
University of Amsterdam
13/12/2012

Many thanks to Henry Hooghiemstra for the invitation to present at the recent palynology meeting in Amsterdam hosted by the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystems Dynamics (IBED). The program of talks was broad and interesting ranging from the deep time geological history of the Amazon basin (Carina Hoorn) to the use of video game technology in visulizing landscapes (Bodo Schuetze); watch videos of his work, or read the thesis.

View Schuetze’s work on recreating Mauritius in 3D on Vimeo

I contributed some new work on human-landscape interaction in the central Andes, entitled: “Ecosystem service provision sets the pace for pre-Columbian Andean societal development”. It was very exciting to get feedback from such an esteemed audience on this new work. The days talks concluded with the IBED seminar given by Mark Bush (Florida Institute of Technology) which countinued the South American human-environment theme but we moved to the lowlands for “Amazonia in 1491: A paleoecological perspective”. Mark’s talk built on his recent work exmining the extent of human impact on Amazonia (references 1-3 below) which has cautioned against assuming widespread and intensive human impact within Amazonia prior to the arrival of Europeans.

Following the seminars we had drinks at the institute and an excellent meal in Amsterdam. Thanks again to Henry and all those at IBED who hosted a high class and scientifically stimulating meeting.

Understanding pollen and spore diversity

November 2, 2012
WDG

Linnean Society Palynology Specialist Group meeting
Linnean Society of London
Burlington House
1st November 2012

PCRG members at the Linnean Society 1st November
Left-Right: Hayley Keen, William Gosling, Alice Kennedy and Encarni Montoya

Yesterday four members of the Palaeoenvironmental Change Research Group (PCRG) visited the Linnean Society of London to attended the annual palynology meeting. The talks were excellent and covered a wide range of issues in palaynology from the configuration of Late Triassic Cassopollis grains (Wolfram Kurschner, University of Oslo), through how pollen and spores are built (Stephen Blackmore, Royal Botanic Garderns, Edinburgh) to understanding global patterns of mass-extinctions with particular focus on the Cretaceous-Paleogene (Vivi Vajda, University of Lund). For further information on the days program click here to visit the meeting web site.

The PCRG contribution to the meeting was made by Hayley Keen who presented the first paper related to her doctoral research to an exteral audience entitled “Pollen counting for diverse tropical ecosystems”. The paper presented:

A statistical model (developed by co-author Felix Hanke) which simulaltes pollen counting in order to estimate the size of pollen count required to develop a robust ecological insight from the fossil pollen record, and
compared model predictions with empirical data from a diverse tropopical ecosystem (Mera, Ecuador) to assess the reliablity of the model.

It is hoped the application of the model to fossil pollen counting will allow more efficient and effective use of palynologists time. The paper was very well recieved despite the audible intake of breath when Hayley recommened that to characterize pollen richness (diversity) in some settings pollen counts in excess of 2000 grains might be required!

Sediment sampling on the Andean flank, Ecuador

October 10, 2012
HayleyKeen

One of the key goals of the fieldtrip to Ecuador (August-September) was to sample organic and volcanic (tephra) layers from sedimentary exposures with the aim of obtaining new information about past envrionmental change in the region. Our Ecuadorian collaborator, Dr Patricia Mothes (Instituto Geofisico), had identified four of sites she thought might be useful too us: El Fatima Dique, Mera “2” Dique, El Rosol and Vinillos.

At the Fatima site, near Puyo, a thin organic bed was sampled sandwiched between volcanic ash deposits. Wood macrofossils from this deposit have been dated to the last glacial period.

For further descriptions of what we found and field photos read on…