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 PhD studentship opportunity

December 16, 2013
WDG

Funded PhD studentship opportunity, October 2014 start
Department of Environment, Earth & Ecosystems, The Open Univeristy
Central England NERC Training Alliance (CENTA)
Closing date for applications : 31/01/2014

Past tropical vegetation stability: forest-savannah dynamics in tropical West Africa

William D. Gosling & Phil Jardine

  • Maintain a modern pollen monitoring network in lowland tropical West Africa
  • Reconstruct past vegetation change from fossil pollen records
  • Identify signature of approaching tipping points
  • Field work in tropical Africa (Ghana)

Continue Reading

Introducing Adele Julier: New PCRG PhD researcher

October 14, 2013
adelecmj

Adele Julier

Adele Julier and a Malvaceae

Hello! I’m Adele and I started my PhD about a week ago. It’s been a little intense but I can almost find the lab without a map now, so it is probably time to introduce myself.

I’ll be studying pollen-vegetation relationships in Ghana, as part of the NERC funded project ‘500,000 years of solar irradiance, climate and vegetation changes’. This means I’ll be using pollen traps to figure out how pollen outputs vary between (and sometimes within) different vegetation types in Ghana. I will also be trying my hand at chemotaxonomy and video making. I’m heading out to Ghana (along with Phil Jardine) in just over a week to do my first lot of field work which will involve seeing the plots, collecting existing traps, replacing them with new ones, and setting up some new sites. I’m very excited.

My background is broadly botanical; I did a BA at Magdalene College, Cambridge in Natural Sciences specialising in Plant Science and then an MSc in Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh.

Here’s a picture of me holding the biggest Malvaceae flower I’d ever seen and being incredibly happy about that.

To find out more about me visit my blog: Plants in real life

PCRG February

March 1, 2013
WDG

Four new workstations installed in the Past Environmental Change microscope lab

Four new workstations installed in the Past Environmental Change microscope lab

Excitement in February saw the arrival of a new research grant within the PCRG, to look at pollen and spore chemistry from Lake Bosumtwi (watch this space for new post-doc and PhD studentship positions), and (just in time) the expansion of benches in the microscope lab which will ensure that the new people will have spaces to sit in! In addition, we had a paper published with long time friends and collaborators at the University of Leeds; Roucoux et al. (2013).

Despite the disruption of the lab refit Hayley and Frazer have been cracking on with pollen and chironomid analysis. Encarni and Frazer returned from field work in Ecuador and half the samples have so far made it back to The Open University; we now wait with anticipation for customs to release the other box!

Four shiny new benches from the other side

Four shiny new workstations from the other side – woo

Meanwhile I have been working on exam questions for the Geological Record of Environmental Change module (S369), interviewing prospective PhD candidates for the October 2013 start projects and have been on a training course to learn about the Vitae support for research student training.

500,000 years of solar irradiance, climate and vegetation changes

February 20, 2013
WDG

William Gosling

William Gosling pollen trapping in west Africa. A studentship on the new grant will investigate modern pollen-vegeation relationships from tropical West Africa.

I am delighted to be able to report that the PCRG has recently obtained a NERC standard grant to investigate “500,000 years of solar irradiance, climate and vegetation changes” (NE/K005294/1).

Investigators on the project are:

Supported by project partners:

Much thanks to the many people who have supported and helped us in the development of this proposal. Now time to do some fun science…

Continue Reading

PCRG October

October 31, 2012
WDG

The back end of September and October has been very busy as I have tried to catch up with the teaching, administration and research activity which somewhat accumulated whilst on field work!

Major tasks have been:
1) the marking and coordination for level 3 Geological Record of Environmental Change (S369) module examination,
2) getting used to my new role as Post Graduate Tutor looking after all things related to a doctoral students in the Department of Environment, Earth & Ecosystems, and
3) trying to find time to finish off three manuscripts for submission!

Other members of the lab have also been busy:
* Encarni has arrived from Valenti Rull‘s lab at the Botanical Institute in Barcelona as a NERC Fellow and is settling in to life in Milton Keynes, more details soon…
* Lottie is getting into data analysis and writing up of the Lake Bosumtwi pollen an N isotope data,
* Natalie is writing, crunching numbers and waiting for a machine to be fixed…
* Bryan is working on gelling biogeographic data together in GIS

Imagae of a Toarcian foraminifera taken by Alice Kennedy facilitated by the new cable which allows our microscope camera to talk to a computer – hooray!

* Hayley has been preparing for talking at the Linnean Society palynology meeting on 1st November “Understanding pollen and spore diversity”, and helping “steal” a microtome for sectoning her wood macrofossils,
* Frazer has started to plot Andean and Amazonian midge distributions against temperature, and
* Alice has been taking photos…

In the midst of all this fun I was sent this great video which brightened my day. I hope you enjoy it as well…

PCRG June

July 2, 2012
WDG

I have been engaged with two major activities during June: 1) submission of a research proposal to NERC, and 2) excitement of my first online teaching module going live to students, Cyprus activity, within Practical science: Earth and environment module (SXG288). Other members of the group have been writing up methods chapters (Natalie), number crunching and submitting abstract to the International Paleolimnology Symposium (Lottie), and submitting first year probation reports (Hayley and Frazer).

Continue Reading

Blog at WordPress.com.