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This year we have had a series of seminars about the LAPD and useful R packages for your work! Some in Spanish, others in English, but here you can find the link https://www.youtube.com/@neotomadevia7

There is funding to recruit a Ph.D. student to undertake a paleoenvironmental investigation of Holocene sea level and climate change in eastern Cuba. The research will form a critical component of a larger inter-disciplinary project focused on better understanding prehistoric environmental-human interactions in the Caribbean, including questions to do with human migrations and early agriculture. The Ph.D. research will involve fieldwork in Cuba along with an analysis of proxy indicators such as pollen, micro-charcoal, and non-pollen palynomorphs, possibly in conjunction with XRF core scanning. The funding package will consist of $18,000CND/year, of which $9000/yr will be a stipend and $9000/yr will involve providing technical assistance in the laboratory for 7 to 8 hours/week. Ideally the candidate would begin in September 2016 or January 2017.
The Ph.D. candidate will be based at and working out of Bishop’s University (located in Sherbrooke, Québec), but will be enrolled in a Ph.D. program at a university elsewhere in the region. The laboratory the candidate would be joining at Bishop’s is newly built and contains a range of analytical and field equipment. More information on the laboratory can be found at: http://www.envirolab.ubishops.ca/home.html

Interested individuals should email an updated copy of their CV, an unofficial copy of their university transcripts, and the names of two referees to mperos@ubishops.ca as soon as they can.

Posted by Matthew Peros, Canada Research Chair in Climate and Environmental Change and Associate Professor
Department of Environmental Studies and Geography
Bishop’s University

Email: mperos@ubishops.ca

A new dataset called EIRA (Easter Island Radiocarbon Ages) has been recently presented by V. Rull in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (Front. Ecol. Evol., 26 April 2016). The EIRA database contains all the radiocarbon ages from Aroi, Kao, and Raraku sediments published to date (1984–2015) and can be freely accessed at NOAA !

As described by the author in this paper: “The EIRA database provides paleoecologists and paleoclimatologists with a thorough chronological dataset to be analyzed statistically as a whole or by parts (by sites, by age intervals, etc.), aimed at contributing to the development of new age-depth models, reconsider the existing ones, or plan new studies and coring campaigns“. Thank you to the author for this open source database!

The newest overview of palynological research in Latin America comes now with an interactive feature. Data can be visualized and even downloaded by the reader. This feature is within the paper displayed in a Google Maps interactive map. It allows to reader to access the paper’s geographic data in an easy way. By downloading the data and opening it in Google Earth, the readers can extend its interactive experience and zoom into their area of interest.

Check the paper: Flantua, S.G.A., Hooghiemstra, H., Grimm, E.C., Behling, H., Bush, M.B., González-Arango, C., Gosling, W.D., Ledru, M.-P., Lozano-García, S., Maldonado, A., Prieto, A.R., Rull, V., Van Boxel, J.H., 2015. Updated site compilation of the Latin American Pollen Database. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 223, 104–115. doi:10.1016/j.revpalbo.2015.09.008

As part of her Master thesis, Milan Teunissen van Manen, from the Institute for Biodiversity & Ecosystem Dynamics – University of Amsterdam, recorded and photographed large numbers of palynomorphs from the Amazon (Miocene period) and made it available in figshare!

Check this link out to retrieve the data-set: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1396453

And also this other link: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1396562

After a long awaiting, the authors of this new paper are very pleased to present the new site compilation of the Latin American Pollen Database.

This open access paper presents an overview of palynological research from the last decades in Central and South America, Caribbean and Mexico.

The hot topics, research questions and of course the current spatial coverage of pollen records.

The paper is even accompanied by an interactive map viewer where the reader can download the dataset presented in the paper.

Follow this link to start reading! http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034666715001773