April 13, 2016
Herb Wright (1917-2015). Photo: Brigitta Ammann
Last year the pioneering and influential Quaternary scientist Herb Wright sadly passed away. His friends and colleagues have complied an ebook about his life and legacy, including publications, poems and field stories.
Click on the link to read:
“Sedimental Journeys – The Life and Legacy of Herb Wright“
van Beek, R., Gouw-Bouman, M.T.I.J. & Bos, J.A.A. (2015) Mapping regional vegetation developments in Twente (the Netherlands) since the Late Glacial and evaluating contemporary settlement patterns. Netherlands Journal of Geosciences-Geologie En Mijnbouw 94, 229-255. doi: 10.1017/njg.2014.40
Burn, M.J. & Palmer, S.E. (2014) Solar forcing of Caribbean drought events during the last millennium. Journal of Quaternary Science 29, 827-836. doi: 10.1002/jqs.2660
Göldel, B., Araujo, A.C., Kissling, W.D. & Svenning, J.-C. (2016) Impacts of large herbivores on spinescence and abundance of palms in the Pantanal, Brazil. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society in press. doi: 10.1111/boj.12420
Llamas, B., Fehren-Schmitz, L., Valverde, G., Soubrier, J., Mallick, S., Rohland, N., Nordenfelt, S., Valdiosera, C., Richards, S.M., Rohrlach, A., Romero, M.I.B., Espinoza, I.F., Cagigao, E.T., Jiménez, L.W., Makowski, K., Reyna, I.S.L., Lory, J.M., Torrez, J.A.B., Rivera, M.A., Burger, R.L., Ceruti, M.C., Reinhard, J., Wells, R.S., Politis, G., Santoro, C.M., Standen, V.G., Smith, C., Reich, D., Ho, S.Y.W., Cooper, A. & Haak, W. (2016) Ancient mitochondrial DNA provides high-resolution time scale of the peopling of the Americas. Science Advances 2. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1501385
Turner, T.E., Swindles, G.T., Charman, D.J., Langdon, P.G., Morris, P.J., Booth, R.K., Parry, L.E. & Nichols, J.E. (2016) Solar cycles or random processes? Evaluating solar variability in Holocene climate records. Scientific Reports 6, 23961. doi: 10.1038/srep23961
March 30, 2016
March 9, 2016
Research Group of Palaeoecology & Landscape Ecology
Institute for Biodiversity & Ecosystem Dynamics
University of Amsterdam
Date: 01/04/2016
Time: 15:00-18:00
Location: Amsterdam Science Park 904
Registration: Contact Prof. dr. Henry Hooghiemstra or Dr. Carina Hoorn to book your place and receive location details
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
February 26, 2016
European Conference of Tropical Ecology
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
23-26 February 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
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
February 16, 2016
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)
February 15, 2016
February 15, 2016
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:
To register and apply to join the BES peer review committee or for a grant click here.
Ecology of the past 