MSc researcher Jelle Kraak presenting his finding at the SASQUA congress (2024). During his project Jelle travelled to South Africa to conduct field research and meet scientists.

Student research projects

The team involved with the Ecology of the Past blog regularly support research projects of students at both the BSc and MSc level. Students come from a wide range of scientific backgrounds, including (but not limited to) biology, Earth sciences, archaeology, and data science. Projects are designed around the individual students interests and skill set. The geographic focus of projects tends to follow the strength of ongoing research activity – South America, Africa, north-west Europe (the Netherlands) – but ideas for projects anywhere in the world are welcome. In ALL projects we engage students with genuine research activity with the ultimate aim for outputs to be of sufficient quality to be published in an international peer reviewed journal. Typically student projects are combined to create a body of work suitable for publication. Examples of publications featuring student research include: Bönnen et al. (2022) on hominin evolution, de Wolf et al. (2022) on phytoliths of the Netherlands, and Witteveen et al. (2024) on the impact of people on rainforests.

MSc research projects, University of Amsterdam

Current researchers

  • Guus Faber “Palm use by native communities in Indonesia: A literature review” MSc Biological Sciences, Literature review.
  • Anna Haringhuizen “The resilience of the Amazon rainforest and the impact of both government and indigenous land management on its resilience” MSc Biological Sciences, Literature review.
  • Jelle Kraak “Assessing the effect of human induced changes in fire regimes on vegetation in the Drakensberg mountains (South-Africa)” MSc Biological Sciences, Research project.
  • Doortje Nieuwenhuijzen “Traditional and indigenous agricultural practices: evidence for climate change mitigation and adaptation” MSc Biological Sciences, Literature review.
  • Tim Wagenmakers “The role of mountain formation and plant evolution in shaping the differences and similarities between Polylepis and Leucosidea” MSc Biological Sciences, Literature review.
  • Aron Whitehead “Ecological history of Lake Cocococha” MSc Earth Sciences, Research project.

2023-2024

  • Teye Aukes “The hidden world of glass algae: a diatom-based palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of the Ostia palaeo-lagoon, Italy” MSc Biological Sciences, Research project.
  • Reyan Christ “The role of climatic and environmental actors on the extinction of H. antecessor, H. heidelbergensis and . erectus during the mid-Pleistocene” MSc Earth Sciences, Literature review.
  • Hanna Geara “Four Millennia of Vegetation Changes at Lake Añangucocha, Ecuadorian Amazonia” MSc Earth Sciences, Research project.
  • Hanna van den Hil “Greening the desert in Central Asia during the Paleogene?” MSc Earth Sciences, Research project.
  • Avery Huberts “The status of the Araucaria angustifolia in the Atlantic Forest” MSc Biological Sciences, Literature review.
  • Sofie Knol “Comparison between archaeological and palaeoecological records to assess the temporal and spatial patterns of human impacts on the northwest European landscape during the last 12,000 years” MSc Biological Sciences, Literature review.
  • Imre Loman “And then there was fire: A comparison of fire records and archaeological records of first human arrival on Pacific Islands” MSc Biological Sciences, Literature review.
  • Anna Schouten “A reconstruction of Landscape development of Langenboom, Brabant over the past 12000 years” MSc Biological Sciences, Research project.
  • Sanna Wessel “The abundance of spores of coprophilous fungi as a proxy for relative shifts in herbivore densities” MSc Earth Sciences, Research project
  • Sanna Wessel “Fire use and hominin evolution during the last one million years in Africa” MSc Earth Sciences, Literature review.
  • Ronald van der Woude “Did anthropogenic fires and agriculture change the abundance of palms in Amazonia during the Holocene?” MSc Biological Sciences, Literature review.

References (student authors in bold)

  • Bönnen, M.N.T., Gosling, W.D. & Hooghiemstra, H. (2022) Inside-of-Africa: How landscape openness shaped Homo sapiens evolution by facilitating dispersal and gene-flow in Middle and Late Pleistocene Africa. Palaeoecology of Africa 35, 373–396. http://dx.doi.org/10.1201/9781003162766-23
  • de Wolf, I.K., McMichael, C.N.H., Philip, A.L. & Gosling, W.D. (2022) Characterising Dutch forests, wetlands and cultivated lands on the basis of phytolith assemblages. Netherlands Journal of Geosciences (Geologie en Mijnbouw) 101, e17. https://doi.org/10.1017/njg.2022.14
  • Witteveen, N.H., White, C., Sánchez-Martínez, B.A., Philip, A., Boyd, F., Booij, R., Christ, R., Singh, S., Gosling, W.D., Piperno, D.R. & McMichael, C.N.H. (2024) Pre-contact and post-colonial ecological legacies shape Surinamese rainforests. Ecology e4272. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4272
Blog at WordPress.com.