Current Research

Palynological characterisation of Amazonian rainforest communities, Northeast Bolivia

Neotropical Palaeoecology

An ongoing controversy in Neotropical palaeoecology is the extent to which rainforest communities have responded to climate change over the last glacial-interglacial cycle. Many hypotheses that attempt to explain vegetation dynamics over this period are reliant on a small number of fossil pollen records and extrapolation of results across large areas of the Amazon Basin is commonplace. Moreover, the interpretation of these diagrams is based on a handful of key pollen types and can by no means adequately reflect the true β-diversity (between-habitat diversity) exhibited by Neotropical rainforests. One way in which progress can be made in this field is to establish characteristic pollen signatures for key rainforest communities, to numerically compare these with fossil pollen assemblages and thereby extract additional ecological information. To this end, my study aims to (a) provide pollen signatures for four key Amazonian rainforest communities based on data from a network of pollen traps; (b) to compare these modern analogue signatures with pollen assemblages obtained from the fossil record; (c) to improve, where possible, the identification of key rainforest pollen types to a higher taxonomic resolution and (d) to expand the pollen reference collection held here at the Geography Institute of the University of Edinburgh.

Project Aims

I am working alongside Francis Mayle and William Gosling to palynologically characterise four rainforest communities located within the Neotropical moist evergreen forest of the Noel Kempff Mercado National Park: Moist terra firme evergreen forest, terra firme liana forest, seasonally-inundated evergreen forest and riparian evergreen forest. The following list is an outline of some major research questions:

• To what extent can Neotropical rainforest communities be characterised and differentiated by their pollen spectra?


• Can such characterisation improve the interpretation of Late-Quaternary fossil pollen records?


• How well is the structural and floral composition of lowland Neotropical evergreen forests represented in modern pollen assemblages?


• Is β-diversity (between-habitat diversity) significantly manifested in modern pollen spectra and what are the consequent implications for the interpretation of the fossil record?


• Can we improve the taxonomic resolution at which rainforest pollen-types can be identified?