Current Research News

I am currently visiting the Climate Change Institute (University of Maine - Orono) as an Assistant Research Professor. This position allows me to work closely with Dr. Jasmine Saros. We continue to develop our research integrating neo- and paleoecological approaches to improve our understanding of diatom and limnological responses to climate change. explore additional paleolimnological applications for lake-basin modeling techniques, incorporating some of the work I've done with multiple researchers over the past 5 years.

Our paleoecological research on Cyclotella species from lakes in the Beartooth Mountains and Glacier National Park is now in the publication phase, with several interesting developments. Some results from this project were discussed in a special session of the International Diatom Symposium (St. Paul) chaired by Jasmine Saros (Maine). We now have several manuscripts nearing submission status.

For the past two years, I have been working with Sheri on some lakes in the Yellowstone-Grand Tetons National Parks region - this investigation is now close to completion - with the diatom assemblage counts from Blacktail Pond complete and the diatom counts on samples from Hedrick Pond nearly complete.

Another project that I am involved in, collaborating with Sarah Spaulding (Colorado), is looking at the historical distribution of Didymosphenia geminata in the waters of the western US; it is just starting to ramp up.

We are continuing to develop research on the paleoecology section of the Hominid Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project, which seeks to obtain sediment cores from several of the most important fossil hominin and early Paleolithic artifact sites in the world, located in Kenya and Ethiopia. My role is to help develop the diatom paleoecological aspect of the project using a similar model to the Lake Malawi Drillcore Project.

This past Spring, I returned from a few weeks working at Lake Malawi, collecting some modern diatom samples from around the Cape MacClear region along side a student from Andy Cohen's lab, Meg Blome. Together we are looking at spatial patterns of the modern distribution of species to help better constrain the interpretations of paleoecological reconstructions from Lake Malawi. I am also mentoring a new student in Sheri's lab on some modern diatom genetics and attempting to relate these to patterns of evolution and climate change in plankton from the Lake Malawi 1C & 1B cores.

The development of the diatom wiki resource continues. We have added a forum to the site and have been continually adding content - including a new web resources section and a greatly expanded illustrated glossary. If you are interested in helping with The Diatom Wiki, please contact me via email.


Recent & Upcoming Publications

I am a co-author on a new paper with Will Hobbs in The Holocene entitled "Environmental history of a closed-basin lake in the US Great Plains: diatom response to variations in groundwater flow regimes over the last 8500 cal yrs BP". This paper takes a novel approach to reconstructing the history from Kettle Lake, comparing fossil diatom assemblage changes to carbonate deposition through the Holocene. The Online First edition is available through the link above.

Our article in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology entitled "Late Pleistocene paleohydrography and diatom paleoecology of the central basin of Lake Malawi, Africa" has recently been published. Download the full article here.

Our chapter on diatoms used as indicators of lake-level change in freshwater systems in the 2nd edition of The Diatoms: Applications for the Environmental and Earth Sciences has been published. You can purchase the book directly from Cambridge University Press.

Our paper "Holocene Lake-Level Trends in the Rocky Mountains, U.S.A.", which includes results from a transect of cores that we took from Foy Lake, Montana has been published in Quaternary Science Reviews. The article discusses changes in sedimentary structures that support the conclusions of the diatom-inferred Holocene lake-level changes from my dissertation work.

A manuscript is in preparation with Matthew Julius (St. Cloud) on the description of a new species of diatom present in the fossil material from Lake Malawi. This new form closely resembles Cyclotella quillensis but differs through the presence of several significant features.





Last updated: May 17, 2011
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