October 31, 2024
Wei, C., Li, M., Mao, L., Mander, L., Jardine, P.E., Gosling, W.D. & Hoorn, C. (2024) A 23-million-year record of morphological evolution within Neotropical grass pollen. New Phytologist. DOI: 10.1111/nph.20214
This paper is the latest to come from the PhD thesis of Caixia Wei who defended at the University of Amsterdam earlier in 2024. To find out more about Caixia’s work click here.
July 12, 2024
On the 20 June 2024 the 18th Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) seminar was delivered by Kumar Akhilesh (Sharma Centre for Heritage Education). This seminar was a little different to most MAA seminars in that it focused on another INQUA project, rather than a specific research line. In the talk Kumar outlined the INQUA funded “PalaeoHome” project and highlighted work on hominin evolution in the Indian sub-continent.
Details of this seminar can be found here. You can find more Mapping Ancient Africa seminar videos on the “Ecology of the Past” YouTube channel.
June 7, 2024
The “Fire in Human Evolution” international Symposium will take place at the University of Leiden (10-11 June 2024). The meeting is being organized by Femke Reidsma and Amanda Henry. The meeting will include talks and discussion on:
For full details click here.
December 19, 2023
On November 17, 2023, Caixia Wei (魏彩霞) accomplished a pivotal milestone by successfully defending her thesis titled “Morphometrics of Modern and Fossil Poaceae Pollen from South America” at the distinguished Agnietenkapel (University of Amsterdam). During the defense ceremony, Caixia showcased her professional knowledge and expertise in the field of paleoecology in a relaxed and cheerful manner. The committee members, promoters (Carina Hoorn, William Gosling, Phillip Jardine), and attendees (~50 people) responded with frequent smiles, laughter, and numerous rounds of applause! After the defense, a delightful reception and dinner were held, where Caixia was showered with an abundance of hugs, kisses, heartfelt wishes, and thoughtful gifts. These wonderful memories will support Caixia on her journey ahead…
For a glimpse into the event, you can watch Caixia’s insightful 10-minute project presentation here:
Additionally, most of Caixia’s thesis is available for download at this link:
July 6, 2023
A recent open letter to Wiley from Associate Editors working for the Journal of Biogeography posted by Lucie Zinger and others highlighted a dispute between the editors and the publishers in relation to: (i) the proposed switch of the journal to a pure open access model, (ii) financial barriers to publication, (iii) the proposed increase in throughput of manuscripts to maximise profits, and (iv) the manuscript referral process (see @LucieZinger, read tweet here, dated 28 June 2023). This got me thinking about these issues in relation to the journal that I am most involved with editing which also published papers related to biogeography; Plant Ecology & Diversity.
Plant Ecology & Diversity is the journal of the Botanical Society of Scotland. It is published in association with Taylor & Francis and any profits are split between the publishers and the academic society. To promote diversity and inclusion among authors the journal has a policy of double blind peer review (and has done for many years). Further, there are no publication fees for authors to publish in this journal, however, this does mean that published papers are behind a pay wall. An “Open Access” option is available to all authors for a fee (hybrid model), although the invited “Grubb Reviews” series is automatically published Open Access. Subject Editors and Associate Editors “work” for the journal gratis (for free) and the love of furthering the field.
If you have manuscripts related to biogeography, and prefer this mode of publishing, then please consider the fit of your paper to Plant Ecology & Diversity and send them our way. Or indeed if you have manuscripts related to one of our other key themes:
The journal accepts original research articles (c. 7000 words), rapid communications (c. 2500 words), review articles (c. 12,000 words), and perspectives (c. 2500 words). Other options for publishing are of course also available 🙂
July 3, 2023
The Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) project has a double session of talks and a poster session at the INQUA congress in Rome 2023. Our session will be on Wednesday 19 July.
If you are at the INQUA Rome congress please come along to our talks and posters in Session 64: Mapping Ancient Africa: Climate, Vegetation & Humans.
Part 1: 08:30-10:30
Part 2: 11:00-13:00
Continue Reading
May 19, 2023
The thirteenth Mapping Ancient Africa seminar was delivered by Andrea Manica on the 18th May 2023. In the seminar Andrea introduced the pastclim R package and gave examples of how it can be applied to address questions related to human evolution and dispersal.
Details of this seminar can be found here. You can find more Mapping Ancient Africa seminar videos on the “Ecology of the Past” YouTube channel.
April 14, 2023
The seminar delivered by Emma Mbua (National Museums of Kenya) on the 13th April 2023 was the twelfth in the Mapping Ancient Africa series. The seminar highlighted new finds from archaeological sites in eastern Africa that have yielded bones of various animals, including early humans.
Details of this seminar can be found here. You can find more Mapping Ancient Africa seminar videos on the “Ecology of the Past” YouTube channel.
To find out more and keep up to date with new insights from this research visit the project web sit here.
January 23, 2023
The 9th Mapping Ancient Africa seminar, and first of 2023, took place on Thursday 19 January. The seminar was delivered by Celine Vidal (University of Cambridge) and showcased recent work on the dating of volcanic deposits to constrain the age of hominin fossils in eastern Africa.
Details of this seminar can be found here. You can find more Mapping Ancient Africa seminar videos on the “Ecology of the Past” YouTube channel.
References
December 13, 2022
Assistant and / or Associate Professor positions in:
Closing date for all positions 8 January 2023
Ecology of the past 