Eric Grimm: A high-resolution record of hydrologic variability, vegetation, and fire from the Northern Great Plains, North America
Suzette Flantua: Assembling the biogeographic history of the Northern Andes – A multi-proxy approach
Carina Hoorn: The Amazon at sea: Onset and stages of the Amazon River from a marine record, with special reference to Neogene plant turnover in the drainage basin
Keith Richards: Why did the Arctic seal, Phoca hispida, become land-locked in the Caspian Sea 2.6 million years ago? : Palynology and foraminifera explain how
The meeting will be followed by the IBED seminar given by Prof. Jonathan Overpeck, click here for more details.
Salamanca Villegas, S., van Soelen, E.E., Teunissen van Manen, M.L., Flantua, S.G.A., Santos, R.V., Roddaz, M., Dantas, E.L., van Loon, E., Sinninghe Damsté, J.S., Kim, J. & Hoorn, C. (2016) Amazon forest dynamics under changing abiotic conditions in the early Miocene (Colombian Amazonia). Journal of Biogeography online. DOI: 10.1111/jbi.12769
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:
Miller, C.S. (2014) 520,000 years of environmental change in West Africa. PhD Thesis, Department of Environment, Earth & Ecosystems, The Open University.
McMichael, C., Piperno, D., Neves, E., Bush, M., Almeida, F. & Mongelo, G. (2015) Phytolith assemblages along a gradient of ancient human disturbance in western Amazonia. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 3.DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2015.00141
Mackenzie, G., Boa, A.N., Taboada, A.D., Atkin, S.L. & Sathyapalan, T. (2015) Sporopollenin, the least known yet toughest natural biopolymer. Frontiers in Materials 2. DOI: 10.3389/fmats.2015.00066
Nelson, B.W., Ferreira, C.A.C., da Silva, M.F. & Kawasaki, M.L. (1990) Endemism centers, refugia and botanial collection density in Brazilian Amazonia. Nature 345, 714-716. DOI: 10.1038/345714a0
Souto, C.P., Kitzberger, T., Arbetman, M.P. & Premoli, A.C. (2015) How do cold-sensitive species endure ice ages? Phylogeographic and paleodistribution models of postglacial range expansion of the mesothermic drought-tolerant conifer Austrocedrus chilensis. New Phytologist 208, 960-972. DOI: 10.1111/nph.13508 COMMENT: Variation in genetic diversity used to infer the location of glacial refugia.
Open access online:
Flantua, S.G.A., Hooghiemstra, H., Grimm, E.C., Behling, H., Bush, M.B., González-Arango, C., Gosling, W.D., Ledru, M., Lozano-García, S., Maldonado, A., Prieto, A.R., Rull, V. & Van Boxel, J.H. Updated site compilation of the Latin American Pollen Database. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 223, 104-115. DOI: 10.1016/j.revpalbo.2015.09.008
As part of my MSc research project on Early-Miocene paleodiversity shifts due to marine incursions in the Amazon basin, I recorded and photographed large numbers of palynomorphs. The database consists of a set of images (Teunissen van Manen, 2015a) that I took with my smartphone (bundled in pdfs for sharing purposes) and an Excel overview file (Teunissen van Manen, 2015b) where each of the entries is described. Some of the entries are well documented taxa (C’mon, who hasn’t heard of Zonocostites ramonae and Mauritidites franciscoi before?) while others are “types” that are not formally described – mainly because in Amazonian sediments new, unseen palynomorphs pop up all the time. Indeed, this was the reason why I started the database in the first place: I was merely trying to keep up with the vast diversity that I encountered during sample counting.
Mauritidites franciscoi
TP 100
Seeing the added value of having a digital record of the palynological diversity from the Amazon basin samples, my project supervisor, Carina Hoorn (UvA), encouraged me to publish the database online so others could also access it. I’d like to invite you to take a look. I hope it can maybe help you with identifying taxa or, who knows, linking taxa across the Amazon basin… if you do, please let me know!
…or maybe it will have you rejoice in the huge diversity and alien beauty of pollen morphology, just as it rejoiced me as I was working through my (seemingly endless) samples.
On Wednesday I attended my first Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting (NAEM) unfortunately, due to prior commitments, I was not able to attend the whole event, but I still managed to get a nice insight into the vibrant Dutch Ecological research community. Particularly exciting for me was the “Biodiversity in Space and Time” theme. Plenary sessions by Alexandre Anotonelli (University of Gothenburg) and Hans ter Steege (Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden) focused on the Amazon ecology past and present. The subsequent session on the same theme, organized by Daniel Kissling (University of Amsterdam) and Niels Raes (Naturalis Biodiversity Center), was also excellent and ranged from species richness patterns past and present in Gabon (Andre van Proosdij, Naturalis Biodiversity Center), through soil microbes (Kelly Ramirez, Netherlands Institute of Ecology) to the role of sea level change on island biodiversity (Kenneth Rijsdijk, University of Amsterdam). I am looking forward to attending more of these meetings in the future and getting involved with the NERN community.
Palynologische Kring presents four seminars focus on past climate change
Ecology of the past 