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Environmental Change Research Group | Geography
We take a long-term view on ecological questions. Using paleorecords (especially from lake-sediment archives) we reconstruct the environments of the late Pleistocene and Holocene to address the links between biodiversity, climate, and disturbance processes.
People in the lab  [Lab alumni]
  • Daniel Gavin - Professor
  • Buzz Nanavati - NSF Postdoctoral Fellow. paleoecology and the nonlinear and interacting relationships between humans, climate, and the environment through time. Co-advising with Andres Holz at Portland State.
  • Geoffrey Johnson - Ph.D. Student. Forest Ecology, Environmental History, Climage Change, Human-Environmental Interactions.
  • Jamila Baig - Ph.D. Student. Reconstructing climate from chironomid assemblages; paleolimnology; vegetation and fire history in the Oregon High Cascades.
  • Monika Ruwaimana - Ph.D. Student, Institute of Ecology and Evolution. Fulbright Scholar. Peatland history in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.
  • Chantel Saban - Ph.D. Student. Paleoecology, fire history, Great Basin, human paleoecology.
Recent publications  [News archive]
Impact of a thick tephra deposition on forests and the fire regime of the Oregon Cascade Range. Article in Quaternary Science Reviews by PhD candidate Jamila Baig.
Direct measurements of tropical peat carbon loss assessed by repeat coring. Peat mapping by ICESat-2: New paper in Catena from a collaboration with Dr. Gusti Anshari at University of Tanjungpura.
Monika Ruwaimana's paper on the upper Kapuas peats: The oldest extant tropical peatland in the world: a major carbon reservoir for at least 47,000 years.
Geomorphology and vegetation history of the Upper Fraser, British Columbia: Deglacial landforms and Holocene vegetation trajectories in the northern interior cedar-hemlock forests of British Columbia.
Geoffrey Johnson's work on Coos Bay sediments and recent coastal processes: Estuarine dissolved oxygen history inferred from sedimentary trace metal and organic matter preservation.
High resolution lake sediment record reveals self‐organized criticality in erosion processes regulated by internal feedbacks.
Current and recent funding from:
Other stuff
Late Pleistocene and Holocene Environmental Change on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington by D.G. Gavin and L.B. Brubaker.

Climate Refugia workshop (Two reports published from the August 2012 workshop).

Revealing Nature's Past: High-school curriculum for teaching climate-change concepts and an introduction to paleoecology.

Standard Operating Procedures

Updated September 2018