15:00-15:30 Frank Wesselingh & the PRIDE team How high can you get? Mountain uplift driving diversification in Pontocaspian lakes before humans bring down the unique aquatic biota?
15:30-16:00 Christiaan van Baak Mediterranean-Paratethys connectivity during the late Miocene to recent
– 16:00-16:15 tea/coffee break –
16:15-17:15 Keith Richards Studies in Caspian palynology: Vegetation, climate and sea level change
17:15-18:00
Questions and discussion
New literature review published open access:
Flantua, S.G.A., Hooghiemstra, H., Vuille, M., Behling, H., Carson, J.F., Gosling, W.D., Hoyos, I., Ledru, M.P., Montoya, E., Mayle, F., Maldonado, A., Rull, V., Tonello, M.S., Whitney, B.S. & Gonzalez-Arango, C. (2016) Climate variability and human impact in South America during the last 2000 years: Synthesis and perspectives from pollen records. Climate of the Past 12, 483-523. doi: 10.5194/cp-12-483-2016
This is my first time attending the European Conference of Tropical Ecology and my second visit to Germany. The conference attracted c. 350 delegates; big enough to have plenty of interesting science, and yet small enough to find everyone you wanted to. The keynote speakers chosen to head the days provided some exciting insights into various new developments across the tropics, including: the importance of biogeography (Richard Corlett), metabolism and carbon cycles (Yadvinder Malhi), diversity and resilience (Lourens Poorter), tropical peatlands (Sue Page), agricultural landscapes (Ravi Prabhu), and mutualism of figs and fig wasps (Martine Hossaert-McKay).
From the many other interesting talks five in particular grabbed my attention, these were:
Lahr, M.M. et al. (2016) Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya. Nature 529, 394-398. doi: 10.1038/nature16477
Rademaker, K., Hodgins, G., Moore, K., Zarrillo, S., Miller, C., Bromley, G.R.M., Leach, P., Reid, D.A., Yepez Alvarez, W. & Sandweiss, D.H. (2014) Paleoindian settlement of the high-altitude Peruvian Andes. Science 346, 466-469. doi: 10.1126/science.1258260
da Silva, S.G. & Tehrani, J.J. (2016) Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales. Royal Society Open Science 3. doi: 10.1098/rsos.150645
Veenendaal, E.M. et al. (2015) Structural, physiognomic and above-ground biomass variation in savanna-forest transition zones on three continents – how different are co-occurring savanna and forest formations? Biogeosciences 12, 2927-2951. doi: 10.5194/bg-12-2927-2015
Zoe and William just after the graduation ceremony (UvA)
Two students (Zoe van Kemenade and Tessa Driessen) have recently completed projects looking at past environmental change on Samoa working in the Research Group of Palaeoecology & Landscape Ecology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Zoe’s project, part of her BSc Future Planet Studies (major Earth Sciences) at UvA, was entitled “A multi‐proxy analysis on the effect of climate and human activity on the environment of Samoa during the Holocene” and investigated charcoal, macro-fossils, and algae. Tessa’s project, “Biodiversity, fire and human dynamics on Samoa over the last 9200 years”, was completed as an internship during her MSc in Environmental Biology at Utrecht University (UU) that was co-supervised by Rike Wagner-Cremer. Tessa focused on the fossil pollen record to reconstruct past vegetation change. Both projects were conducted in cooperation with Jon Hassel and David Sear (both University of Southampton) who provided access to the Samoan sediments; for more on the Southampton Pacific Islands projects check out their blog Palaeoenvironmental Laboratory at the University of Southampton.
The results from both projects, and work by the University of Southampton team, will be presented at this years GTO conference (European conference of tropical ecology) in Gottingen next week.
William giving his personal view on the work of Tessa at her gradation ceremony (UU)
The British Ecological Society (BES) awards grants for “Research”, “Training and Travel”, “Ecologists in Africa”, and “Outreach”. Funding for individual grants is up to GBP 20,000. I am therefore delighted to announce that “palaeoecology” has been added to the list of categories under which funding can be applied for. For further details click here.
In the light of this change I would like to encourage palaeoecologists to:
Join the BES,
Join the BES peer review college, and
Apply for BES grants!
To register and apply to join the BES peer review committee or for a grant click here.
Miller, C.S. (2014) 520,000 years of environmental change in West Africa. PhD Thesis, Department of Environment, Earth & Ecosystems, The Open University.
Han, F., Rydin, C., Bolinder, K., Dupont-Nivet, G., Abels, H.A., Koutsodendris, A., Zhang, K. & Hoorn, C. (2016) Steppe development on the Northern Tibetan Plateau inferred from Paleogene ephedroid pollen. Grana 55, 71-100. doi: 10.1080/00173134.2015.1120343
First of all, I would like to clarify that the next post is just my personal opinion, not related to any institution or colleague involved in my research. Spoiler alert: there is nothing written here that I have not commented with any research colleague, don’t expect to find here any revelation. However, it is hard to believe the scarcity of notes published about this topic from the people who suffer it, making more difficult to find comprehension outside the scientific community, and even sometimes from inside.
This morning, a friend that works in the European Commission in Brussels has congratulated me because it seems that today (11th February) is the International Day of Women in Science. Well, it is a completely valid congratulation as I am a woman and I work in science. I am also aware that making an international day of pretty much anything is a very fashionable thing to do nowadays. However, besides honouring past figures, I am not really sure what this celebration is about and I would like to express my personal opinion on the subject. Moreover, this piece has a particular focus on my own experience of science in my country of origin, Spain.
Ecology of the past 