Week 13 - Packrat Middens

This week we'll be reading:

Smith, Felisa A. and Julio L. Betancourt. 2006. Predicting woodrat (Neotoma) responses to anthropogenic warming from studies of the palaeomidden record. Journal of Biogeography 33: 2061-2076.

You might recognize the name of the first author as our official faculty member, Felisa! This is a paper on using middens to study how packrats have reacted to changing temperatures over time.

This paper focuses on using fecal pellets to study body size change in the woodrats. Traditionally the data sources from packrat middens are plant macrofossils and pollen. These are analyzed in a similar way to pollen from lake cores that we discussed earlier in the semester. We'll talk about using these data in class.

Packrat paleomiddens can also contain other material from the environment, such as archaeological artifacts, bones, and teeth. I'll probably throw in some teeth, since that's what I study for my research.

For our discussion on Thursday, I want you to start thinking about designing studies of your own. How has climate change affected species and ecosystems in the past? Design a study and post it in the comments.

Week 12 - Tree Rings

This week we'll be reading:


Li, Jinbao, Edward R. Cook, Rosanne D'Arrigo, Fahu Chen, Xiaohua Gou, Jianfeng Peng, and Jianguo Huang. 2008. Common tree growth anomalies over the northeastern Tibetan Plateau during the last six centuries: implications for regional moisture change. Global Change Biology 14: 2096-2107.


This week, when you are reading the paper about tree rings and climate in Tibet, be thinking about how those methods could apply to other studies.  Last week, we had a good discussion regarding the collapse of Copan.  If you were to conduct a study using tree rings and similar metrics to those used in the Tibet study, how would you apply those to Copan to answer hypotheses?  What other metrics would be useful?  Be specific about your hypotheses and sample sizes and describe what your hypothetical dataset would look like.  What other forms of data would be useful to determine the Copan collapse?  Think of at least three.  Be prepared to discuss your hypothetical experiment and blog post and have the class scrutinize them like we did for the palynology paper last week!

Week 11 - Palynology

This week we're learning about using pollen records to learn about paleoclimate. We'll be reading:

McNeil, Cameron L., David A. Burney, and Lida Pigott Burney. 2010. Evidence disputing deforestation as the cause for collapse of the ancient Maya polity of Copan, Honduras. PNAS 107:3, 1017-1022.
(Note that on the wiki, the paper is listed as McNeil et al 2009 - this is a typo.)

As you read this paper, think about how the data are analyzed and interpreted. What, if anything, would you have done differently with the pollen data?