Introducing: Seringe Huisman

July 3, 2017
WDG

Seringe Huisman

Hi all! My name is Seringe (Dutch for lilac flower), and unsurprisingly I am a biology student. I completed my BSc Biology at the VU University, specializing in ecology. Being fascinated by tropical rainforest since I was a kid, I attended a Tropical Ecology course at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), resulting in a research project with Crystal McMichael from the Palaeoecology & Landscape Ecology group on the late-Holocene fire history of western Amazonia. Besides performing this palaeoecological project, focusing on the aspect of ancient human activity, I followed courses of Latin America Studies to broaden my perspectives on the current socio-environmental complexity and conservation status of the area. This year, I have gotten the amazing opportunity to join Crystal McMichael on a fieldwork expedition to the Ecuadorian Amazon!

Seringe Huisman in the field...

Seringe Huisman in the field…

The fieldwork will be part of my Master’s thesis, elaborating on the regional patterns of vegetation composition changes in relation to human disturbance. I will be taking sediment cores from two lakes in the Sangay region of Ecuador, perform charcoal and phytolith analysis to reconstruct fire and vegetation assemblages over the late Holocene and compare the results to previously established records across western Amazonia. While I am currently attending the MSc Biological Sciences Limnology & Oceanography Master’s track at UvA, I could not help but directing my first project into Paleoecology again! My field trip is largely made possible by obtaining €1150 of grants through the Treub-Maatschappij and the Amsterdam University Fund, for which I am very grateful.

I am super excited to be heading to Ecuador soon, and will be back in a month with field stories, mosquito bites and hopefully some suitable sediments!

Seringe Huisman and palaeoecology friends

Seringe Huisman and palaeoecology friends

Past climate change seminars

June 15, 2017
WDG

Palynologische Kring presents four seminars focus on past climate change

Date: Thursday 22 June
Time: Starts 14:10
Location: University of Amsterdam, Institute for Biodiversity & Ecosystem Dynamics, Science Park

  • 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

For percise details of location and time please contact the organiser Prof. dr. Henry Hooghiemstra.

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

European Conference of Tropical Ecology 2016

February 26, 2016
WDG

ECTE-logo

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:

Continue Reading

Online, open access:

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

Haffer, J. (1969) Speciation in Amazonian forest birds. Science 165, 131-137. DOI: 10.1126/science.165.3889.131

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

Ecology of the past on film: Hayley Keen

October 6, 2015
WDG

Whilst conducting her PhD research Hayley Keen helped produced two of short films about her research project Past environmental change on the eastern Andean flank, Ecuador:

  1. on her field work, which was the winning entry into the American Geophysical Union (AGU) student video competition in 2014, and
  2. a presentation summing up her PhD project in just 3 minutes!

First prize in the AGU student video competition (2014)

Three minute thesis (The Open University, 2014)

Follow Hayley’s ongoing research on this blog and on Twitter @Hayley1keen 

Pollen database of Early-Miocene Amazonian palynological diversity

June 29, 2015
milantvm

By Milan Teunissen van Manen
MSc Biological Sciences, University of Amsterdam.

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.

REFERENCES

Teunissen van Manen, Milan (2015a): Miocene Amazonian Palynological Diversity – Image files. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1396453

Teunissen van Manen, Milan (2015b): Miocene Amazonian palynological diversity database – Entries record. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1396562

This project was conducted with Research Group of Palaeoecology & Landscape Ecology, part of the Institute for Biodiversity & Ecosystem Dynamics.

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