INQUA 2019 – there we go Dublin!
I’m not updating this section regularly just because my pile of work grows faster than my ability to break it out, so I missed all news from 2018. I essentially I had a great fieldwork in Ethiopia again in January-February 2018 and focused in producing data from the cores we got there in 2017; I attended IPA-IAL, held in Stockholm during the summer solstice and looking at my Twitter feed at that time you can see all I did!. I also attended recently the great SIBECOL meeting where, as usual, I equally learnt and enjoy something every day – even a bit of a cold I got and I kindly shared with my beloved @palaeoecology – . See summaries of the meeting by great friends and colleagues as Aitor Ameztegui or the Punky Outreachers of Ecomandanga.
I want to draw your attention today to this big conference we, Quaternary people, like to have every 4 years: INQUA meeting! It will happen in Dublin this year, between 25th and 31st of July and will gather together all the people, co-workers and research teams I have ever worked with! So it will be great. Not only that, this is the first time I have submitted a contribution to an “Arts and Science” session, so on top of presenting how the Bale Mountains of Ethiopia are good sensors of environmental change and how the afroalpine is resilient to fire, the nice people of PaleoIPE and myself are presenting how bodypainting as an art technique may be useful to explain complicated palaeoesciences concepts. PaleoIPE is full of artistic talent and we either play instruments, madly dance, make plays or insanely draw. Recently Jana Vicente joined us to do her PhD under Blas Valero supervision on sub-recent land surface processes affecting lacustrine basins. She’s as much of a talented geologist as an incredible make up artist. So our almighty Jana will guide our ideas into a feasible bodypainting subject. Please check Jana’s instagram and Youtube channel!
We’ll make our presentations publically available so please stay tuned to see our INQUA contributions.
Aragón TV made a short documentary on why Global Change matters and how to study it.
I leave here the link for the program “El Objetivo” from Aragón TV where they interviewed several colleagues from IPE-CSIC on how to monitor and study Global Change (See from minute 22′) . This was made on the occasion of IPE-CSIC being the hosting institution of the 3rd YSM and 5th OSM of PAGES. Several @Paleo-IPE members explained their research, including me on the role of fire in Global Change. Despite very professional, the cut they made in my explanation about fire presents it as something derived from human action exclusively and that’s far from true, at least in Mediterranean environments. Still I think is worth watching and I hope you like it! (in Spanish though!).
The 3rd Young Science Meeting of PAGES is almost here!
We are right 15 days apart of the 3rd PAGES YSM beginning and we have almost everything ready for it to happen! The detailed program will be released very soon in PAGES website and in the mean time you can have a look to the map of Morillo de Tou, the small village in the Pyrenees lowlands, at the Cinca valley, where the YSM will take place. I can advance that we will have a very dynamic and intense schedule fulfilled with the very interesting talks and posters of 81 Early Career Researchers funded by PAGES; we will have some workshops on various topics connected to career fostering, funding, data sharing and discussion groups on these topics and others as making a career outside Academia or how to Communicate Science. Last, but not least, we have a social program that includes looking at the night sky on the company of the Huesca Astronomical Association and some folk singing and dancing (and they make you dance!) of the Dulzaineros del Bajo Aragón
The local organising committee (mainly formed by @PaleoIPE, Rafael Domingo and myself) is really looking forward to meet you!
Bale Mountains Project (BMP): “The Mountain Exile Hypothesis”
This is a DFG funded project led by Georg Miehe in collaboration with several German, Swiss and British research centres and universities. The main objective of BMP is to test to what extent the current Afromontane plant communities are a human-made landscape originated during the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 22 000 years ago), when the drier conditions in the lowlands of Eastern Africa would have favoured the upward migration of humans and plants where wetter conditions were available. Human activities as fire, would have changed dramatically the landscape at the high altitudes of the Afromontane Archipielago. Results of this project will add into the interesting debate around the Anthropocene origins.
To test this hypothesis an international team, (that includes me!), would core different lakes in the Bale Mountains National Park (Sanneti Plateau, Ethiopia) during February 2017. Besides coring, looking for pollen, charcoal, geochemical and isotopical changes, the team includes archaeological research in different settlements, studies on current ecology of various elements of the Afromontane Ericaceous belt and remote sensing to cross-validate observations across time and space.
Really looking forward to go on fieldwork! We’ll camp ca 3500m asl and core various lakes in beautiful landscapes. It’ll be a great adventure and hopefully a fruitful campaign!
3rd Young Science Meeting and 5th Open Science Meeting of PAGES, Zaragoza, May 2017
There we go! Our team at the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology has been working hard along the PAGES executive director and a bunch of dedicated people at PAGES headquaters in Bern to have the registration and abstract submission ready. We, as local organizing committee, are preparing and getting things ready for a such exciting event that will take place between the 7th and 13th of May 2017, here in Zaragoza.
The Young Science Meeting will be held in Morillo de Tou in the Central Pyrenees, in a lovely location to enjoy nature and science. If you are an ECR (usually PhD students in the latter stages of their degree or postdocs within 5 years of completing their degree) with a
focus on paleoscience (data-based or modelers) or global change scientists with a strong, proven interest in paleoscience…THIS IS YOUR MEETING! You have three weeks from now to apply here as deadline is 1st of October for YSM and 20th of December for OSM. Please read the instructions provided by PAGES here as for the YSM you will be required a support sentence, CV and abstract to participate as well as a contribution to the OSM. But I promise it will worth the effort!
Then the OSM will be held in the Auditorium of Zaragoza, an otherwise handy and nice city especially in early spring, where we are preparing an incredible scientific program, where along with friends and colleagues I’ll be convening a session on disturbance dynamics across spatial and temporal scales (session number 5)
I am very much looking forward to meet old and new friends in this new edition of the YSM and OSM of PAGES. See you in Zaragoza next spring and keep tuned for more news!
Palaeoecology Symposium at the AEET-MEDECOS conference
I am happy to announce that, together with colleague and friend palaeoecologist Penélope González Sampériz and the “palaeo-activist” Ana Rosa Gómez Cano, we’ll be convening a session on Palaeoecology at the XIII Spanish Association for Terrestrial Ecology, that will take place next year in Seville. Our session has a great title
“Insights on the 4th dimension: the palaeoecological approach to modern ecological questions and vice versa”
…and we think this is a great opportunity for all those interested on looking at deep time scales to answer relevant ecological questions. The synergistic exchange between palaeo- and neo- ecology may bring a more comprehensive insights of current ecological problems.
Have a look to the conference website and check the very interesting topics that will be dealt.
If you are into palaeo-stuff and reading this, please consider to attend as we welcome contributions from all geographical areas focused on novel use of proxies, quantitative methods and model-data integration to test modern ecological hypothesis. Check our session here
Attending the European Pollen Database Open Meeting
(1-3 June, Aix-en-Provence, France)
I am really happy to attend to this Open Science Meeting of the EPD for various reasons! Probably the most important is to meet many friends and colleagues that I have made and collaborated with over the last 10 years, when I first attended to the very same meeting (in the very same place!). The EPD project has been working for some decades now and over the last few years has fostered amazing research as it usually happens when public data repositories are truly available to anyone. The EPD is supported by MEDIAS-France and by all those supplying published palynological data into it.
This June meeting includes some enlightening workshops led by great colleagues in their respective fields and I am really looking forward into it.
I’ll be presenting a flash talk on one of the projects I am currently working on (PYROS) and you can download my slide here
Dr Graciela Gil-Romera 