Blog evolution

March 18, 2014
WDG

@PalaeolimOver the next few months the “Palaeolimnology et al.” blog will be changing. The first noticeable change will be the title of the blog to “Ecology of the past”. The idea behind changing the name is to have a title that it easily informs the reader about the broad area of our interests.

The changes have been precipitated by three key factors:

  1. A re-definition of the “Palaeoenvironmental Change Research Group” at The Open University (OU), in part as a response to my impending departure,
  2. My desire to have a blog people within the Paleo and Landscape Ecology Group at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) can feel comfortable contributing to, and
  3. The fact this blog has been running for over 3 years and it is probably time for a refresh.

Changes to the static pages and blog content will happen over the next few weeks.

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PCRG February

March 7, 2014
WDG

William on Bainbridge

My first fieldwork from the OU, in 2005, was pollen trapping on the Galapagos. Here I am looking beardy on Bainbridge.

February was an exciting month for me principally because of the finalization of my move to the University of Amsterdam (UvA) where I will become head of Paleo and Landscape Ecology in September. The decision to leave The Open University (OU) has been a difficult one. When I joined the OU as a RCUK Research Fellow in Ecosystem Science in 2005 I would not have believed that I would be in a position to take on a job such as the one in Amsterdam only nine years later. Building the group here during the last nine years has been a lot of fun and I have got to work with some great people. Stand out moments include:

  • Obtaining my first grant as Principle Investigator (c. US$20,000 from the National Geographic for field work in Bolivia),
  • Recruiting, and graduating, my first PhD research students (Joe Williams and Macarena Cardenas),
  • Being invited to participate in large international research efforts (notably the Lake Bosumtwi project),
  • Co-editing my first book (Bush et al., 2011), having my first student to publish a paper getting it in Science (Cardenas et al., 2011), and helping to write a popular science text co-published by the Natural History Museum (Silvertown et al., 2011)

There have been many more amazing things here but I don’t want to swamp this post with a retrospective of my OU career…

Ongoing excitement within the PCRG is happening on a number of fronts:

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New job: Paleo & Landscape Ecology

February 21, 2014
WDG

IBED-UvA-logoI am delighted to announce that later this year I will be moving to the Institute of Biodiversity & Ecosystem Dynamics at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. I will be taking up an Associate Professor position as head of the Paleo & Landscape Ecology group. I am excited, and honoured, by this appointment and look forward to intergrating my ongoing program of research with the world class team in Amsterdam. Over the next few months I am sure further details will appear on the blog about the move as plans evolve towards my start date in September. Exciting times…

In the light of my departure, at that of Emma Sayer (bound for Lancaster), The Open University, Department of Environment, Earth & Ecosystems is now advertising two posts (details below). I have enjoyed my time at the OU and I think there are still good teaching and research opportunities for academics here. If anyone whats to contact me about the posts then I am happy to discuss.

Lectureship  Environmental Science (Advert)
Lectureship / Senior Lectureship in Earth or Environmental Science (Advert)

PCRG January

February 12, 2014
WDG

January 2014 has been pretty mad for me but included presenting a poster at the Quaternary Research Association annual meeting, and taking on the role of chair of the British Ecological Society “Eduaction, Training and Careers Committee“.

Tardigrade egg found in Ghanaian pollen trap by Adele

Tardigrade egg found in Ghanaian pollen trap by Adele

Here is a summary of what other people have been up to:

  • Lottie Miller: submission and approval of thesis corrections (hooray), working on British Ecological Society grant application.
  • Hayley Keen: is finishing up lab work (macro charcoal – done, XRF – done, wood macrofossils – thin sectioned, awaiting identification, pollen – just 4 more samples!); and dealing with minor review revisions to first submitted paper (hooray).
  • Frazer Bird: finished the data collection for two Ecuadorian lakes (Banos and Pindo) and will hopefully begin to write up this data soon; attended the NERC stats course (very useful; would advise everyone to try and get on it).
  • Nick Loughlin: has split and logged the sediment cores recovered from Lake Huila (Ecuador) during recent fieldwork, and begun preparing the samples for pollen.
  • Adele Julier: has been preparing pollen trap samples from Ghana and  learning tropical pollen.
  • Emily Sear: has mostly been on holiday and we are still waiting for the post card! She has also been working at getting results that make sense from the MS2.
  • Phil Jardine:   has been oxidising spores to see what it does to the chemistry, generating FTIR data with the oxidised samples and starting the numerical analysis, and editing film footage from the 2013 Ghana trip.
  • Encarni Montoya: has been doing pollen lab and analysing pollen from Baños, and comparing the midges trends from Pindo and Baños with Frazer.
  • Wes Fraser: Reported back to Royal Society on finding from research grant – paper containing exciting results to follow in next couple of months.
Some pollen from Adele's pollen traps in Ghana

Some pollen from Adele’s pollen traps in Ghana

We have also had 4 papers published with 2014 dates on them:

  • Cárdenas, M.L., Gosling, W.D., Pennington, R.T., Poole, I., Sherlock, S.C. & Mothes, P. (2014) Forests of the tropical eastern Andean flank during the middle Pleistocene. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 393: 76-89. doi: 10.1016/j.palaeo.2013.10.009
  • Fraser, W.T., Watson, J.S., Sephton, M.A., Lomax, B.H., Harrington, G., Gosling, W.D. & Self, S. (2014) Changes in spore chemistry and appearance with increasing maturity. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology, 201, 41-46. doi:10.1016/j.revpalbo.2013.11.001
  • Miller, C.S. & Gosling, W.D. (2014) Quaternary forest associations in lowland tropical West Africa. Quaternary Science Reviews, 84, 7-25. doi: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2013.10.027
  • Sayer, E.J., Featherstone, H.C. & Gosling, W.D. (2014) Sex & Bugs & Rock n Roll: getting creative about public engagement. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 29, 65-67. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2013.12.008

Ecuador Fieldwork : Lake Huila

January 14, 2014
nicholasloughlin

Lake Huila

Lake Huila

So we’re back from a hot and humid Ecuador to the joys of a British winter. Ecuador is an amazing country and the diversity of the flora and fauna surpasses anything that I have experienced before. Continue Reading

PCRG October to December

December 20, 2013
WDG

The latter half of 2013 seems to have been incredibly busy and I have not managed to get my monthly update posts completed since October. Rather than a rapid series of backdates here is a quick summary of what I think the main activities through this period have been!

Thesis defence: Congratulations to both Lottie and Natalie for sucessfully defending their PhD theses! Exeptional effort and hard work from both of you. Well done.

Publications: Four articles have gone through the final stages and been published in top journals. Well done to Lottie, Maca, Wes for leading three of those publications covering Lake Bosumtwi, Erazo and pollen/spore chemistry respectively. Personally I am delighted that the revised tropical pollen atlas is now online and open access. The final stages of publication of the atlas with Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology were hard work but great to see it online and avaliable. Thanks to Lottie and Dan Livingstone for their invaluable contributions.

Grant: We have been awarded further 14C dates from NERC radiocarbon facility to improve the chronology on Laguna Khomer Kotcha Upper so that the timing of temperature osscilations revealed by new chironomid analysis (by Frazer Bird) can be related to the last global degalciation (c. 18,000 years ago) and the Younger Dryas cooling event (c. 12,800 – 11,500 years ago). This research builds on that of former PCRG PhD student and current research collaborator Joe Williams (Williams et al., 2011; Williams et al., 2012).

Teaching: I have been working primarily on the Geological record of environmental change (S369) presentation, and writing the landforms section for the new level 2 environmental science module.

Fieldwork: Trips to Ghana (Adele and Phil) and Ecuador (Nick, Encarni and Will) have been super successful; AND all the samples have made it back! See posts elsewhere on the blog for details of field work fun.

I am sure other stuff has happened… more in the New Year… and maybe some more pictures when I can get back on my newly “optimized” (killed) office computer 🙂

PCRG publications 2013

December 20, 2013
WDG

Gosling, W.D., Miller, C.S. & Livingstone, D.A. (2013) Atlas of the tropical West African pollen flora. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology, 199, 1-135

Gosling, W.D. & Williams, J.J. (2013) Ecosystem service provision sets the pace for pre-Hispanic societal development in the central Andes. The Holocene, 23, 1619-1624

Miller, C.S., Leroy, S.a.G., Izon, G., Lahijani, H.a.K., Marret, F., Cundy, A.B. & Teasdale, P.A. (2013) Palynology: A tool to identify abrupt events? An example from Chabahar Bay, southern Iran. Marine Geology, 337, 195-201

Roucoux, K.H., Lawson, I.T., Jones, T.D., Baker, T.R., Coronado, E.N.H., Gosling, W.D. & Lähteenoja, O. (2013) Vegetation development in an Amazonian peatland. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 374, 242-255

Rull, V., Montoya, E., Nogué, S., Vegas-Vilarrúbia, T. & Safont, E. (2013) Ecological palaeoecology in the neotropical Gran Sabana region: Long-term records of vegetation dynamics as a basis for ecological hypothesis testing. Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, 15, 338-359

PCRG PhD studentship opportunity

December 16, 2013
WDG

Funded PhD studentship opportunity, October 2014 start
Department of Environment, Earth & Ecosystems, The Open Univeristy
Central England NERC Training Alliance (CENTA)
Closing date for applications : 31/01/2014

Past tropical vegetation stability: forest-savannah dynamics in tropical West Africa

William D. Gosling & Phil Jardine

  • Maintain a modern pollen monitoring network in lowland tropical West Africa
  • Reconstruct past vegetation change from fossil pollen records
  • Identify signature of approaching tipping points
  • Field work in tropical Africa (Ghana)

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