[tugs] Final Physical Geography Candidate
- From: TUGS - Toronto Undergraduate Geography Society <r.tchoukaleyska@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: TUGSGeneral <tugsgeneral@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:55:09 -0500
This is a reminder that Dr. Sarah Finkelstein , the final short listed
candidate for the Physical Geography position is visiting the
Department tomorrow, Tuesday, March 1st. Dr. Finkelstein's
research talk will be held in room 2125 at 4:00pm. The Search
Committee encourages all to attend.
See research talk abstract below
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Tuesday March 1 - 4:00 to 5:30pm
- Room SSH 2125
Dr. Sarah Finkelstein (PDF - U.
Ottawa)
THE PAST IS THE KEY TO THE PRESENT:
USING
PALEOECOLOGY TO UNDERSTAND ECOLOGICAL CHANGE
Paleoecology is the study of how ecosystems
change on century and
millennial time scales. These long-term records supply important
evidence for paleoclimatic and other paleoenvironmental changes.
They also provide key insights into the mechanisms through which
ecosystems change and develop, and allow hypotheses about
ecosystem dynamics to be tested through time. Pollen grains
preserved in lake or wetland sediments have long been used to
reconstruct paleovegetation quantitatively; I show how advances in
pollen grain taxonomy and in the use of regional databases are
allowing pollen analysis to become a ?sharper? tool, increasingly able
to track species-level interactions through time. Paleoecological
techniques, including the analysis of pollen and diatoms (microscopic
aquatic algae) in peat records spanning the past 5000 years at a Lake
Erie coastal marsh, were used to test different hypotheses of wetland
initiation and subsequent plant community change. This research
indicates that geomorphic activity provides a fundamental control on
wetland development, but hydrological changes, driven both by
isostatic rebound and by climatic variability, acted to reorganize plant
communities episodically since the middle Holocene. The
paleoecological record from this wetland also provides a context for
modern day changes by showing which once-dominant plant
communities are no longer common and by identifying an invasive
plant species. I am now applying paleoecological techniques to
determine how aquatic ecosystems in two lakes in the central
Canadian Arctic have responded to Holocene climatic shifts.
Ultimately, paleolimnological records taken from a number of lakes
that have varied in diatom diversity and in productivity will be used to
test new ideas about the role of these in responses to disturbance and
in resilience.
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Roza Tchoukaleyska
TUGS - President
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Toronto Undergraduate Geography Society
Sidney Smith Hall, Rm 613
100 St. George St.
Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3G3
416-978-2057
http://www.geog.utoronto.ca/info/tugs
tugs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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