Searching for fossil pollen of Theobroma cacao, the wild chocolate tree
An informative and comic exploration of the history of plant domestication, the evolution of our modern agricultural choices and the potential for new crops to appear on our tables in the future.
Humans contributed greatly to the extinction of megafaunal species during the last Ice Age. When these giants disappear, the impacts on the environment are appropriately ground shaking.
Over-hunting of seed-dispersing mammals could be more detrimental to tree diversity and carbon stocks in Amazonian forests than the direct impacts of deforestation
Keeping-up with the neighbours: drought-stressed Amazon trees select growth at the risk of death2/5/2016 Recent droughts have highlighted the danger that a drier climate could pose to rainforest stability. A new study in Nature (1) suggests that the ways that individual trees respond to water-stress leaves them more vulnerable in the years following a drought.
A guest blog piece about my experiences in the field, for the SAGES Fieldwork advice blog. Read it here
Originally published April 2012 in Experimentation Online.
Could human impacts be about to overtake nature in a forest the size of the continental U.S.? |
AuthorJohn Carson is a palynologist working mostly in the South American tropics and currently based at University of Reading. Archives |