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).

PCRG March

April 2, 2012
WDG

In March the Palaeoenvironmental Change Research Group (PCRG) have been involved with data collection in the labs, training, fieldwork planning (and un-planning) and outreach.

Two notable pieces of pollen data collection have made significant progress this month: 1) Hayley has been working at collecting data to establish what is a suitable pollen count size to assess vegetation change within her highly diverse Amazonina samples, and 2) Lottieis on to about the last dozen samples to complete the overview of 500,000 years of pollen from Lake Bosumtwi (Ghana); an amazing pollen record and an excellent research effort which will be the cornerstone of her PhD thesis! More soon on both these pollen stories as they unfold… In addition, I am pleased to report that the list of taxa within our pollen reference collection has finally been fully digitized – Thank you Jason; details of the >3000 taxa collection will soon be available on the lab web pages.

Gigantic Prasinophytes (>100 microns)

Also in the lab: Alice Kennedy, working on ‘deep time’ palaeoecology, has identified a bloom in the foraminifera Reinholdella macfadyeni and gigantic Prasinophytes associate with marine annoxia in sediments from Yorkshire. Will be interesting to find out what these all mean at the next lab meeting!

At the beginning of March four of us (Frazer, Hayley, Lottie and myself) attended a First Aid for field work training course run by Mediact. The course was excellent with plenty of useful information and the opportunity to practice techniques such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation (on dummies) and bandaging (on each other). Unfortunately we will have to wait to practice any of the techniques in the field as our planned trip to Ecuador looks likely to be postponed due to injury to one of our members! Get well soon Frazer 🙂 On the up side this should allow me to catch up with the piles of papers I should be writing.

The month finished with an exciting outreach event. I was asked to present our research to the Oxford Geology Group. The event was hosted at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. It was an excellent day of talks and it was fun to discuss our research with interested people.

Blog at WordPress.com.