Paleoecology and Biogeography Lab - University of Oregon Geography

Environmental Change Research Group | Geography Department

We study the influences of natural disturbances and climate change on the composition and structure of forests, at several scales in space and time, through the use of interdisciplinary approaches. We use lake sediments to reconstruct past climate events and their effects on ecosystems. We also use records of tree growth (tree rings) and spatial analyses to address processes operating more recently.

See an interactive map of our study sites.

News
Aquila Flower wins a research grant from the Mazamas to conduct paleo-ecosystem ecology using isotopic records from tree rings.

Erin Herring wins first place in the poster competition at the Northwest Science meeting.

Aquila Flower presented her work on budworm outbreak and fire history at the Central Oregon Fire Science Symposium, April 17-18, in Bend.

Lab members present at the Northwest Scientific Association meeting in Boise, March 2012:

Dave Fisher: Synthesizing and Visualizing Late Pleistocene Changes in Olympic Peninsula Forest Composition
Dan Gavin and Linda Brubaker: Postglacial Climate and Fire-Mediated Forest Diversity on the Western Olympic Peninsula, Washington.
Erin Herring: Climate and Vegetation in a Putative Pleistocene Refugium in Northern Idaho Inferred from a 120,000-Year Sediment Record.

Upcoming PAGES workshop at the University of Oregon:

Climate Refugia: Joint Inference from Fossils, Genetics and Models. August 1-3 2012.

New detailed paleoclimate record from British Columbia:

Gavin, D.G., A.C.G. Henderson, K.S. Westover, S.C. Fritz, I.R. Walker, M.J. Leng and F.S. Hu. 2011. Abrupt Holocene climate change and potential response to solar forcing in western Canada. Quaternary Science Reviews.
[doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2011.03.003] [Data]

Erin Herring receives research funding from the Northwest Scientific Association for her project: