British Ecological Society | Ecology of the past

PCRG January

January 31, 2013
WDG

We are taking the BES festival of ecology to music festivals in 2013! “Tell me when”… you’d better read the blog!

January seems to have flown past and has been another active month. With group members variously involved in:

International Biogeography Symposium,
Field work in Ecuador,
Developing the capability of the lab to produce sections from fossil wood,
Preparation for the start of teaching the “Geological Record of Environmental Change” (S369) for 2013, and
Successfully obtaining support from the British Ecological Society to do ecological science outreach at music festivals during this summers festival of ecology!!! Want to join us…??? Click here to find out how!

PCRG November & December

January 10, 2013
WDG

The last two months of 2012 were exceptionally busy!

On the research front

Grants took centre stage for much of my time. First writing for the NERC December 1st deadline was pressured as usual, and second response to reviewers comments on the July submission was interesting.
Paper writing proceeded with reviewer and co-author comments on three manuscripts hopefully desitined for Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology (lead by Hayley), Palaeo3 (lead by Macrarena) and The Holocene (with Joe Williams) respectively.
Four scientifc meetings were attended by group members: 1) British Ecological Society winter meeting at University of Birmingham (myself), , 2) American Geophysical Union congress in Sanfrancisco (Lottie), 3) Dutch and Belgian palynology meeting at the University of Amsterdam (myself), and 4) the Palaeo50 workshop at Oxford University (Encarni).

On the teaching and administration front

Two tasks dominated the non-research activity: 1) teaching the Geological Record of Environmental Change (S369) exams assessment and assigment, and 2) as Post Graduate Tutor keeping up with NERC developments for the new Doctoral Training Partnerships.

PCRG members on filed work in Cayabe-Coca National Park (2012). Left to right: Hayley, Encarni, William and Frazer.

PCRG members on field work in Cayabe-Coca National Park (2012). Left to right: Hayley, Encarni, William and Frazer.
Encarni and Frazer have returned to Ecuador Jan-Feb 2013 to collect further sedimentary cores. More on the blog soon…

Finally all that remains is to say “Happy New Year” from the PCRG and on with 2013… 🙂

PCRG August

August 29, 2012
WDG

I am writing this August post from the Hotel Rincon Escandinavo (Quito, Ecuador) most of this month has been pretty hectic as we have been preparing for this field work trip and trying to get as many things out the way before hand.

We seem to have been quite involved in conference activity: Lottie presented “500,000 years of vegetation change from West tropical Africa” at the International Paleolimnology Association Symposium in Glasgow, Hayley had an abstract on “Pollen counting for diverse tropical ecosystems” accepted for the Linnean Society Palynology Group meeting (1 November) and group members also submitted abstracts for consideration to be presented at the American Geophysical Union Congress and British Ecological Society meeting (both in December); fingers crossed these will be accepted as well.

Regarding the field work. Preparation seems to have gone well and we have arrived in Quito with all out bags, despite a short (1 hour) connection in Madrid. Tomorrow we will meet up with Dr Patricia Mothes (Instituto Geofisico) and set out our detailed plans. As I have now been up for more than 24 hours I should probably get some sleep… Plan is to blog more about the trip as it happens.

PCRG April & May

May 31, 2012
WDG

Time seemed to escape me in April so I have a lot of research group action to report in this post! Here are some highlights…

At The Open University (OU) the research students have all been busy (of course): Natalie presented her 3rd year talk at the CEPSAR student conference and attended a meeting in Durham, Lottie spent two weeks at University College London (Environmental Change Research Centre) learning to become a statistics guru studying the “Numerical Analysis of Biological and Environmental Data” course, while Hayley and Frazer have been writing up their first year probation reports ahead of their mini-vivas next month. Over in Florida Bryan submitted his first PhD paper and has headed off on field work in Peru; and most significantly… I am very pleased to report that Nikki successfully defended her PhD thesis! Congratulations Nikki!

Thinking of PhD I was also pleased to have the opportunity to welcome my PhD supervisor, Frank Mayle, to The OU to give a CEPSAR seminar last week. It was great to be able to show off the labs to Frank at last having promised to invite him down when I arrived at The OU in 2005! He gave a very interesting talk on new archaeological findings from beneath the rain-forest in the Amazon Basin.

Away from The OU a couple of weeks ago I was down at Charles Darwin House for the British Ecological Society meetings committee meeting! We were working on the program for the annual meeting in Birmingham during December this year and it is shaping up to be a very exciting event; keep up to date by following the BES on twitter (@BritishEcolSoc).

British Ecological meetings

February 23, 2012
WDG

BES careers 2012

I am currently a member of the British Ecological Society (BES) council. The BES is a ‘learned society’ based at Charles Darwin House in London which publishes four academic journals, has thousands of members and is open to anyone with an interest in ecology. As part of my role on council I serve on two committees which run different aspects of the societies activity: 1) meetings, and 2) education, training and career s. This month we have had meetings of both these committees. Two highlights of the societies activity related to these committees were:

the establishment of a new Special Interest Group in Macroecology, and
the forthcoming undergraduate careers conference.