Ondrej Mottl and Suzette Flantua will be presenting an African Pollen Database (APD) practical tutorial about working with paleoecological data in R ! Please join us Wed, April 26 at 9am EDT (time zone converter). Please email sji15@psu.edu for the zoom link and instructions.
At this workshop, you will learn to use the new Ratepol package (info here and here):
search for APD sites from Neotoma in R
begin making age models
calculate rates of change for vegetation from pollen records
For more information, check out the schedule below and see past workshops here.
Socorro Dominquez and Simon Goring will be presenting an African Pollen Database (APD) practical tutorial about working with paleoecological data in R ! Please join us Wed, April 5 at 10am EST. Please email sji15@psu.edu for the zoom link.
At this workshop, you will learn to:
search for APD sites and filter data from Neotoma in R
make simple pollen diagrams
do simple analysis like look at change in taxa across time
For more information, check out the schedule below and see past workshops here.
Chris Kiahtipes will be presenting a, African Pollen Database (APD), practical tutorial about working with paleoecological data in R for beginners! Please join us Wed, February 22 at 9am EST. Please email chris.kaihtipes@gmail.com for the zoom link.
Also, if you are interested in joining, please follow the set-up guide below before the start of the workshop in order to make sure you are ready to go and follow along in real-time during the workshop!
The African Pollen Database community is hosting a series of workshops including practical data tutorials and discussions to help paleoecologists working in Africa integrate these data into research and teaching.
Our theme for Spring 2023 is “using R to understand African paleoecology”, and the schedule is posted here.
Our first workshop will be February 22 at 9am EST. Chris Kiahtipes will be provided a guided tutorial that can be followed live to help you use R and RMarkdown to develop reproducible research workflows for pollen data. This will be ~1 hour. Please register in advance by emailing Chris (chris.kiahtipes@gmail.com) to receive the zoom link and a guide to setup your workspace ahead of the workshop.
To see our launch meeting from February 8 that includes a tour of the African Pollen Database on the Neotoma Paleoecology Database, watch this video.
Interested in African paleoecology? Want to incorporate African pollen data into your research or teaching?
If you read nothing else, please take this survey before January 25!
The African Pollen Database (APD) has been relaunched, and the Neotoma Paleoecology Database now contains over 200 APD records. Data stewards working with APD and Neotoma have been meeting regularly for the last two years to upload data, but we are now changing the format of our meetings in order to start focusing on helping people use APD data for research and teaching!
We are developing a schedule of practical tutorials on APD data workflows in R, using Rneotoma, and a few other topics to take place over next few months (see this video for general info).
This is open to anyone interested in African paleoecology (students, researchers, teachers, etc)! If you or your students might be interested in taking part in one or all of these, please take this very brief survey by January 25 to let us know. Also if you have other students or researchers you think should get this email, let Sarah Ivory (sji15@psu.edu) or Chris Kiahtipes (chris.kiahtipes@gmail.com) know.
Applications are invited from qualified and highly-motivated students for an exciting PhD studentship in the areas of paleoecology and community ecology of South American lowland rainforests.
The successful candidate will be primarily responsible for developing tests for evaluating the effect of humans through space and time on species range sizes and developing analyses to compare diversity patterns and range sizes from different data sources in mountainous regions, interpretation of pollen-stratigraphical data for reconstructing range size through time, and applying mapping techniques to assess the patterns over time and space.
Special requirements for the position:
The successful candidate must have knowledge and experience of quantitative analyses of ecological or palaeoecological data (preferably using the statistical software R), as well as documented skills in one or more research fields relevant to the position.
Experience with large databases and some experience with geospatial analysis software, such as in ESRI ArcGIS, QGIS or R is an advantage.
It would be beneficial to have a background in one or more of the following research fields: biogeography, macroecology, palaeoecology, mountain biodiversity, community ecology, applied statistics, numerical ecology.
We are seeking to recruit a Neotropical palaeoecologist to join the recently funded “The past peoples of Amazonia: Assessing ecological legacies” project(PIDr. Crystal McMichael, funding NWO, based within the Department of Ecosystem & Landscape Dynamics). The project aims to reconstruct cultural histories from lake sediments in northwestern Amazonia, and link past human activities with modern ecological observations. The project involves analyzing microfossils (including pollen, phytoliths, and charcoal), and the development of a transfer function that estimates past human impacts in tropical forest systems.
We are particularly looking for a candidate with expertise and experience, in:
Fieldwork in remote areas.
Neotropical pollen.
Quantitative analysis, including familiarity with R and Geographical Information Systems.
Posted on behalf of Thomas Giesecke:
EUROPEAN POLLEN DATABASE
Meeting and training workshops
1-3/06/2016
Aix-en-Provence, France
We offer exciting keynote lectures, an extensive poster session to showcase your research, and two days of training with experts in software, databases, and modelling.
We want your opinion on how to develop the European Pollen Database (EPD) to make it a better resource for research, education, and data storage.
NO registration fee
Workshop topics include:
Plotting and archiving palaeoecological data, using Tilia and Neotoma
Charcoal analysis software and database
How to use modern surface samples for ‘analogue’ reconstructions of the past
I am glad to say that after almost two months out of the office running around with 8 bags of equipment, Frazer and I have finished our tour of the Americas. As the work has been so diverse, we would like to split our comments and impressions into two different posts, we hope you enjoy them!
Ecology of the past 