JOB: PhD candidate in Palaeoecology & Landscape Ecology

July 28, 2015
WDG

UvAInstitute for Biodiversity & Ecosystem Dynamics
Faculty of Science
University of Amsterdam

Characterization of Neotropical ecosystems by their modern pollen spectra and organic chemical composition

  • Develop skills in pollen identification, pollen chemical characterization, and the analysis of organic biomarkers.
  • Examine ecological variation across an altitudinal gradient of nearly 4000 meters on the tropical western Andean flank.
  • Improve understanding of how ecosystems function in a biodiversity hotspot, and how they might be identified in the fossil record.

Mashpi (25)The considerable biodiversity of Neotropical ecosystems is under pressure from projected climate change and human activity. Modern ecosystems can be characterized by their pollen rain and organic chemistry, which can in turn provide information about ecosystem health and functioning. However, little is known about how pollen assemblage and chemical composition (of pollen and plants) vary along environmental gradients. Altitudinal transects provide an opportunity to study a range of environments and ecosystems with a relatively small geographic area. By improving our understanding of modern ecosystems we can improve our interpretation of fossil records, and consequently better understand how modern ecosystems came into being.

The main objectives of this PhD project are to:

  1. Generate the first modern pollen assemblage and chemical data set for the Neotropics,
  2. Characterize the landscape-scale variation in pollen assemblage and chemistry composition, and
  3. Identify the key environmental drivers that determines pollen assemblage and chemistry composition variation.

Publication date: 27 July 2015
Closing date: 18 September 2015
Level of education: University (Masters)
Hours: 38 hours per week
Salary indication: €2,125 to €2,717 gross per month
Vacancy number: 15-286

Applications should be emailed to application-science@uva.nl, with in the subject line the position you are applying for and vacancy number (15-286). Please make sure all your material is attached in only one pdf. Applications should include a detailed CV including educational experiences, a list of research projects and/or publications, a letter of motivation, relevant work experience, and the names and contact addresses of two academic referees from whom a reference for the candidate can be obtained.

For more details, including information on how to apply, click here (UvA), or here (via academic transfer).

For further information visit the Palaeoecology & Landscape Ecology web pages, or contact Dr. William D. Gosling  directly.

Tropical Botany in Belize: Part 2 – Las Cuevas

April 1, 2015
nicholasloughlin

Tropical Botany in Belize

By Nick Loughlin

Las Cueavs Forest Reseach Station (Photograph by Anna Turbelin)

Figure 1: Las Cueavs Forest Reseach Station (Photograph by Anna Turbelin)

As mentioned in my last post I have recently returned from a 2 week field course in tropical botany run by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) in conjunction with their MSc course on the ‘Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants’. The field course allowed for 10 NERC funded PhD students in relevant fields to accompany the MSc students out to Belize to learn a host of valuable skills in tropical botany and ecology.

To find out what we did read on…

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Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting 2015

February 13, 2015
WDG

NERN-NWO-ELIFE-NECOV_2015Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting
10-11 February 2015
by William Gosling

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.

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International Biogeography Society Conference – Bayreuth, Germany

January 28, 2015
Erik de Boer

IBS LogoInternational Biogeography Society
7th biennial conference
January 8 – 12, 2015
University of Bayreuth, Germany
Report by Erik de Boer

Two weeks ago I attended the biannual International Biogeography Society (IBS) conference in Bayreuth, together with 600+ other people from more than 50 different countries. This IBS conference, my first IBS meeting, proved to be an exciting event during which I met scientists from many different disciplines and heard talks on cutting-edge biogeographical research.

The IBS conference was held in the Bavarian city of Bayreuth, in the middle of the biodiverse landscape of Upper Franconia. This landscape provided the training ground for Alexander von Humboldt, the founder of the field of biogeography. The 4-day conference included a wide variety of symposia and many, many posters. The conference dinner in the German Steam Train Museum was highly memorable. The conference was closed by a lecture from Daniel Simberloff, once a doctorate student of Edward O. Wilson, who received the Wallace Award for his outstanding contributions to invasion ecology.

Erik_PicI had a talk in the plenary symposium of ‘Ecosystem response to past climate change’, organized by David Nogués-Bravo and Francisco Rodríguez-Sánchez. The symposium covered the dangers of climate change to biodiversity and tried to assess if the range and rate of adaptation, migration, persistence, or extirpation, that are registered in deep-time records, palaeorecords, and the recent past, are adequate responses for predicted climate change in the future. I addressed this issue from the point of view of a small remote island, where migration is obviously a limiting factor. I showed how I reconstructed climate and its effect on island biota during the last 40,000 years using long-term palaeoecological records from Mauritius (de Boer et al, 2013 & 2014). These records show that different climate regimes result in different ecosystem response to climate change in the past. Local extirpation or population collapse of larger vertebrates was a natural phenomenon in the lowlands of Mauritius due to frequent climate extremes (I will discuss this in more detail in my next blog; de Boer, 2015). Despite these population collapses, island biota have always (in the timeframe of my records) survived natural climate change. Therefore, my take home message was not to focus on the effects of (future) climate change alone. Other key components of global change, such as invasive species and habitat destruction, are more imminent threats to the biodiversity of many islands. For more information on my research, including publications, click here.

More information on the IBS read on (below) or visit the IBS website or blog. All abstracts and other details of the IBS conference in Bayreuth can be found here. The next IBS meeting will take place in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil) in March 2017.

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Past environmental change in the Amazon basin – AGU video

September 8, 2014
WDG

Hayley Keen’s video “Past environmental change in the Amazon basin” has been shortlisted for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) student video prize. Please watch and like Hayley’s video; top “Liked” videos will win entry to the AGU 2014 Fall meeting.

View all the videos on the AGU YouTube channel.

Three new videos on the Ecology of the Past Youtube channel

July 25, 2014
philjardine

We’ve got a bumper crop of palaeoecological film making for you today, with three videos uploaded to our very own ‘Ecology of the Past’ Youtube channel. We’ve got an interview with Will Gosling, talking about the Bosumtwi pollen chemistry project and his own background and career (it’s a timely and somewhat poignant addition to the channel, because this is Will’s last day at The Open University before heading off to Amsterdam). Also posted are research presentations by Frazer Bird and Hayley Keen, which were filmed during the PhD student conference on 21st May. For the first time at the Open University these presentations were carried out in the Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) format.

News articles:

Unesco to rule on Tasmania forest and Great Barrier Reef, BBC News Asia.

Climate change will ‘cost world far more than estimated’, by Tom Bawden, The Independent.

Scientific articles:

Heslop-Harrison, J. (1979) Aspects of the structure, cytochemistry and germination of the pollen of Rye (Secale cereale L.). Annals of Botany, 44, 1-47.
Summary (Adele): Sometimes, the old ones are the best, and this behemoth of a paper contains a huge amount of useful information on the chemical structure and development of Rye pollen grains. As I am working on the chemistry of grass pollen at the moment, it is incredibly useful to know that this sort of information exists and can be used to inform both my experimental protocol and interpretations.

Michelutti, N., Blais, J.M., Cumming, B.F., Paterson, A.M., Rühland, K., Wolfe, A.P. & Smol, J.P. (2010) Do spectrally inferred determinations of chlorophyll a reflect trends in lake trophic status? Journal of Paleolimnology, 43, 205-217. doi: 10.1007/s10933-009-9325-8
Summary (Frazer): Quick and easy way to extract data from lake sediment cores.

Rossetti, D.F., de Toledo, P.M and Góes, A.M. (2005) New geological framework for Western Amazonia (Brazil) and implications for biogeography and evolution. Quaternary Research, 63, 78 – 89. doi: 10.1016/j.ygres.2004.10.001.
Summary (Hayley): Research discussing the importance of understanding the underlying geological processes in order to correctly identify the mechanisms controlling modern biodiversity in Western Amazonia, Brazil.

Simpson, J. (2011) On the Ambiguity of Elves. Folklore, 122, 76-83. DOI: 10.1080/0015587X.2011.537133
Summary (Will): Elves depicted in modern literature have a grounding in ancient literature.

Trenkamp, R., Kellogg, J. N., Freymueller, J.T. and Mora, H.P. (2002) Wide plate margin deformation, southern Central America and northwestern South America, CASA GPS observations. Journal of South American Earth Sciences. 15, 157 – 171. PIL: S0895-9811(02)00018-4.
Summary (Hayley): GPS data used to detect plate boundary convergence, subduction and collision within the north west of South America. GPS data between 1991 and 1998 was used to work out rates of movement for plates.

Newspaper articles:

Exclusive: Found after 500 years, the wreck of Christopher Columbus’s flagship the Santa Maria by David Keys, The Independent.

Scientific articles:

Cole, L.E.S., Bhagwat, S.A. & Willis, K.J. (2014) Recovery and resilience of tropical forests after disturbance. Nat Commun, 5, Article number 3906.
Summary (Will): Varying factors have disturbed tropical forests which have recovered at varying rates.

Hoorn, C., Wesselingh, F.P., ter Steege, H., Bermudez, M.A., Mora, A., Sevink, J., Sanmartín, I., Sanchez-Meseguer, A., Anderson, C.L., Figueiredo, J.P., Jaramillo, C., Riff, D., Negri, F.R., Hooghiemstra, H., Lundberg, J., Stadler, T., Särkinen, T. & Antonelli, A. (2010) Amazonia Through Time: Andean Uplift, Climate Change, Landscape Evolution, and Biodiversity. Science, 330, 927-931.

Montade, V., Ledru, M.-P., Burte, J., Martins, E.S.P.R., Verola, C.F., Costa, I.R.d. & Magalhães e Silva, F.H. (2014) Stability of a Neotropical microrefugium during climatic instability. Journal of Biogeography, 41, 1215-1226.
SUMMARY (Will): Thoughts on what happened to species when in Amazonia.

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