What happens when large herbivores disappear from landscapes? Much of my research to date has used the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna as a natural experiment, documenting the cascading effects of the loss of large herbivores on the plant communities they left behind. To do this, I marshall the paleoecological […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The progression through grad school is measured in milestones; some are official (like qualifying exams), others less so, but no less important. This week, I passed such a milestone: I counted the very last pollen grain of my dissertation. For those of you less familiar with the details of paleoecological […]
When Georneys announced that June’s Accretionary Wedge Global Carnival was “What’s your favorite geology word?” I knew that this would be the perfect launching post for this blog. As a physical geographer, an ice-age ecologist, and a frustrated English major, I have a lot of favorite geoscience words (where else […]
The Contemplative Mammoth 