The Contemplative Mammoth
paleoecology
Pollen and the science of failed plant sex
Plants have sex. While flowers, cones, and fruits– basically the vaginas and uteruses of the plant world– feature prominently in human cultures, much of the actual, er, act of plant sex is invisible to us. As northerners dig out from under record-breaking snowfalls and eye the ground for the first crocuses and robins, folks to the south … Continue reading
Crowd-sourcing the 50 most pressing questions in pal(a)eoecology
Last month, I spent a couple of days in Oxford with a group of paleoecologists of many nationalities, timescales, and taxonomic foci, as we frantically narrowed down a list of more than nine hundred crowd-sourced questions to fifty. Our mission: to determine the most pressing, five-year-horizon-scanning questions in the field of paleoecology (or palaeoecology, as my … Continue reading
What are the 50 most important questions in paleoecology?
Paleoecology has really blossomed as a field in the last decades, due in large part to increasing concerns about climate and the environment. It’s always been a strong, dynamic field, going back almost a century ago if you start with the very first modern pollen analyst, von Post, but recently folks in other kinds of … Continue reading
5 letters in PNAS this week respond to a recent YD Impact Hypothesis paper
There are five letters in this week’s PNAS, responding to an article by Isabel Israde-Alcántara et al., that came out earlier this year on purported impact markers in Lake Cuitzeo, Mexico. In one letter (Gill et al. 2012), my coauthors (Jessica Blois, Simon Goring, Jenn Marlon, Pat Bartlein, Andrew Scott, and Cathy Whitlock) and I raise concerns … Continue reading
Blogging ESA: Species Traits and Community Assembly
I’ve been mostly attending talks on community assembly and trait-based ecology so far, as both are subjects I don’t know much about but am interested in. I think there are some really neat opportunities to apply a paleo-perspective to both fields, and I’ve been kicking around potential project ideas for my postdoc and beyond. I … Continue reading
Fire in the American West: A long-term perspective
Today’s post is by guest-blogger Dr. Jenn Marlon, a biogeographer and paleoecologist who studies the history of fire in the American West and across the globe. Dr. Marlon discusses the implications of fire suppression in the west, as explored in a recent paper in PNAS. Fire is fundamental to our planet, and we’ve been making … Continue reading
Contemplating an ice age squirrel’s forgotten snack
Earlier this week, scientists announced the successful propagation of a 32,000-year-old seed, discovered in a burrow made by an Siberian Arctic ground squirrel during the last ice age. The placental tissue of the Silene stenophylla seed was used to cultivate flowering, reproductively viable adults of narrow-leafed campion, which is still found in the Kolyma River … Continue reading
A paper published, a story told: Understanding the impacts of the loss of ice-age herbivores
Paleoecological research involves equal parts detective work, mental time-travel, and story-telling. Clues from the past are collected and pieced together to map out what landscapes might have looked like, and how they may have changed through time. It’s not unlike walking through the set of a play after all the characters are gone, and half … Continue reading
Climate AND humans? A new study using ancient DNA, fossils, & models contributes to a classic problem in paleoecology
The extinction of the ice-age megafauna is one of the most persistent (and contentious) problems in paleoecology. Since the 1960′s, the literature has been dominated by fierce debates about whether humans or climate change were responsible for the demise of the mammoths, mastodons, woolly rhinos, and other now-extinct megaherbivores and their predators. It’s difficult to … Continue reading
Early domesticated dogs may have shared mammoth meals
This is my first Paper of the Week post! One finding of the State of the Geoblogosphere paper that came out earlier this month (in addition to the fact that geobloggers being mostly white male academics, a topic for another day) is that geobloggers are seeking “rigorous analysis of scientific news and research.” I’m hoping to … Continue reading
