PCRG October to December

December 20, 2013
WDG

The latter half of 2013 seems to have been incredibly busy and I have not managed to get my monthly update posts completed since October. Rather than a rapid series of backdates here is a quick summary of what I think the main activities through this period have been!

Thesis defence: Congratulations to both Lottie and Natalie for sucessfully defending their PhD theses! Exeptional effort and hard work from both of you. Well done.

Publications: Four articles have gone through the final stages and been published in top journals. Well done to Lottie, Maca, Wes for leading three of those publications covering Lake Bosumtwi, Erazo and pollen/spore chemistry respectively. Personally I am delighted that the revised tropical pollen atlas is now online and open access. The final stages of publication of the atlas with Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology were hard work but great to see it online and avaliable. Thanks to Lottie and Dan Livingstone for their invaluable contributions.

Grant: We have been awarded further 14C dates from NERC radiocarbon facility to improve the chronology on Laguna Khomer Kotcha Upper so that the timing of temperature osscilations revealed by new chironomid analysis (by Frazer Bird) can be related to the last global degalciation (c. 18,000 years ago) and the Younger Dryas cooling event (c. 12,800 – 11,500 years ago). This research builds on that of former PCRG PhD student and current research collaborator Joe Williams (Williams et al., 2011; Williams et al., 2012).

Teaching: I have been working primarily on the Geological record of environmental change (S369) presentation, and writing the landforms section for the new level 2 environmental science module.

Fieldwork: Trips to Ghana (Adele and Phil) and Ecuador (Nick, Encarni and Will) have been super successful; AND all the samples have made it back! See posts elsewhere on the blog for details of field work fun.

I am sure other stuff has happened… more in the New Year… and maybe some more pictures when I can get back on my newly “optimized” (killed) office computer 🙂

PCRG publications 2011

February 15, 2013
WDG

Bush, M.B., Flenley, J.R. & Gosling, W.D. (2011) Tropical rainforest responses to climatic change, 2nd edn. Springer/Praxis, Chichester.

Bush, M.B., Gosling, W.D. & Colinvaux, P.A. (2011) Climate and vegetation change in the lowlands of the Amazon basin. Tropical rainforest responses to climatic change (second edition) (ed. by M.B. Bush, J.R. Flenley and W.D. Gosling), pp. 61-84. Springer/Praxis, Chichester, UK.

Cárdenas, M.C., Gosling, W.D., Sherlock, S.C., Poole, I., Pennington, R.T. & Mothes, P. (2011) Response to comment on “The response of vegetation on the Andean flank in western Amazonia to Pleistocene climate change”. Science, 333, 1825

Cárdenas, M.L., Gosling, W.D., Sherlock, S.C., Poole, I., Pennington, R.T. & Mothes, P. (2011) The response of vegetation on the Andean flank in western Amazonia to pleistocene climate change. Science, 331, 1055-1058

Gosling, W.D. & Holden, P.B. (2011) Precessional forcing of tropical vegetation carbon storage. Journal of Quaternary Science, 26, 463-467

Hanselman, J.A., Bush, M.B., Gosling, W.D., Collins, A., Knox, C., Baker, P.A. & Fritz, S.C. (2011) A 370,000-year record of vegetation and fire history around Lake Titicaca (Bolivia/Peru). Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 305 201-214

Williams, J.J., Gosling, W.D., Brooks, S.J., Coe, A.L. & Xu, S. (2011) Vegetation, climate and fire in the eastern Andes (Bolivia) during the last 18,000 years. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 312, 115-126

Williams, J.J., Gosling, W.D., Coe, A.L., Brooks, S.J. & Gulliver, P. (2011) Four thousand years of environmental change and human activity in the Cochabamba Basin, Bolivia. Quaternary Research, 76, 58-69

Response of Chironomids to late Pleistocene and Holocene environmental change in the eastern Bolivian Andes

July 10, 2012
WDG

Williams, J.J., Brooks, S. & Gosling, W.D. (2012) Response of Chironomids to late Pleistocene and Holocene environmental change in the eastern Bolivian Andes  Journal of Paleolimnology, 48: 485-501. doi: 10.1007/s10933-012-9626-1.

 

NERC Fellowship success

July 4, 2012
WDG

I am delighted to report that Dr Encarnacion Montoya Romo (currently of the Botanical Institute of Barcelona) has been awarded a NERC Fellowship to join the PCRG. The project is entitled “Evaluation of tropical forests sensitivity to past climate change” (FORSENS) and will examine environmental change at four study sites from different regions of the Neotropics: 1) Khomer Kotcha (Bolivia; 17oS, 4100 m above sea level [asl]) [1-3], 2) Consuelo (Peru, 13oS; 1400 m asl) [4-5], 3) Banos (Ecuador; 0oS, 4000 m asl), and 4) a new lowland site from Columbia/Ecuador to be collected during field work during the project.

The aim of the project is to explore the spatial and temporal consitance of tropical vegetation response to aridity (mid-Holocene dry period) and warming (last deglaciation). The project will use fossil pollen, chironomids, charcoal, non pollen palynomorphs and organic biomarkersto build up a comprehnsive picture of environmental change. The diversity of the project means we have a number of exciting partners, including: Steve Brooks (Natural History Museum), Prof. Mark Bush (Florida Tech),  Prof. Valenti Rull (Botanical Institute of Barcelona) and the Dr. Pauline Gulliver (NERC radicarbon facility).

The fellowship will commence in October 2012. Further information will appear on is blog and group website soon.

REFERENCES
Continue Reading

Blog at WordPress.com.