African Herbivore Biodiversity Change Over Time
Danny gave a lightning talk at the GT’s Global Change Action Symposium. Watch it here!...
New Paper! Plant biomes demonstrate that landscape resilience today is the lowest it has been since end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions
Check out our new paper! I’m so excited to see this work out. Here is a summary of our findings: Resilient landscapes preserve terrestrial biodiversity despite environmental changes. Here, we analyze North American landscape resilience over 20,000 years by examining the residence and recovery times of plant biomes preserved in the fossil pollen record....
Dermestid beetles!
We’d like to warmly welcome the latest addition to our lab, a new colony of dermestid beetles. These beetles primarily feed on carrion, and are referred to as flesh-eating beetles*. We plan to use these beetles to make some beautiful skeletons. We will use the skeletons of known species to compare with our fossils...
Ushering in CPiA
The leadership group for iCCB had our next-to-last meeting in Berlin in December to plan our next moves for creating a new project known as CPiA (Conservation Paleontology in Africa). We are scheduling a meeting in Nairobi for June to finalize the details of this exciting outreach initiative and begin collecting data that will...
ESA 2018
SEPL was well represented at ESA this year! We gave three talks in three days. Jenny gave a five-minute Inspire talk about using paleontology to inform conservation models on Monday. On Tuesday, Jenny presented current and upcoming work looking at climate connectivity. And on Wednesday, Yue presented her latest research exploring the residence time...
Trip to Cambridge
At the beginning of May, Jenny had an incredible, productive trip to Cambridge, UK. There, she got to give a talk at the Museum of Zoology. She also worked with fellow iCCB leadership (Michelle Lawing, Jason Head, and Johannes Müller) to craft a plan for the next phase of research and outreach to be...
Dr. Julie Meachen visits SEPL
Julie Meachen, Assistant Professor at DMU, visited SEPL over the last week to continue work on the Natural Trap Cave project. Julie, along with Dr. Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide, is the principal investigator on the grant that opened up Natural Trap Cave for research over the last 5 years. The original...
iCCB Executive Meeting
iCCB (Integrative Climate Change Biology) is an incredibly successful program, funded primarily by the IUBS (International Union of Biological Sciences), to develop trait-based approaches that can make deep-time perspectives from paleontology applicable for understanding organisms’ responses to climate change. During its last round of funding, the IUBS tasked the iCCB with making inroads with...
Climate resilience NSF has begun!
In just a few weeks, Yue Wang will join the lab to begin examining the landscape characteristics of regions that exhibit long periods of community stasis despite global climate change occurring. Welcome to the lab, Yue!...