A visiting PhD student from the Ecological and Environmental Change Research Group, University of Bergen, Norway, supervised by Hilary Birks, John Birks, Anne Bjune and Svein O. Dahl.
With the rapidly changing arctic environments it is becoming increasingly important to understand the relationship between species distributions and climate. I am investigating the vegetation history on Andøya (69ºN) in northern Norway using plant macrofossils (seeds, fruits and leaves) recovered from sediment cores of three lakes. The focus of the study is the period from the deglaciation to the Holocene climatic optimum (ca 15 000 – 7 000 cal yr BP). This is a period of very high climate variability with a range of active forcings and feedbacks. To quantify the changes in climate parameters reflected in the changes in species assemblages throughout the time period, I am using digitized circumpolar distribution maps to investigate the present climate envelope of arctic species. These data will be used with the macrofossil record to reconstruct the variation in past climate parameters relevant to species distribution. This will contribute to a better understanding of how climate change has affected species in the past and together with other proxy data provide empirical evidence of changes in climate to be used to test and validate climate model experiments.
My research is part of ARCTREC project (ARCTic REcords of past Climate change – dynamics, feedbacks and processes). Read more
