1. What do you study related to biodiversity (what are your research questions, what organisms do you work on)?
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 I am interested in the interactions between plant biodiversity and climate change in the geological past, specifically how changes in greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide can directly and indirectly (via greenhouse induced global climate change) influence the relative abundances and diversity of different plant groups in natural vegetation.
I am currently studying three important intervals in Earth history, the Triassic-Jurassic boundary (~200 million year ago), the Early Toarcian (~178 million year ago) and the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary (~ 90 million years ago) each of which is characterized by major extinction event among marine invertebrate organisms. Firstly, I am attempting along with graduate students from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University to reconstruct changes in the composition of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), an important greenhouse gas. Secondly we hope to determine whether there is a particular threshold of CO2 change which severely alters the composition of natural vegetation, leading to ecosystem collapse and extinction of both plant and animal groups.
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2. How do you study biodiversity (for example, what technological tools and methodologies do you use in your research)?
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 Studying past biodiversity using the fossil record is extremely difficult. Only a minute proportion of the Earth’s original biodiversity at any one interval in the past is preserved as fossils. Paleontologists and paleobotanists also have to contend with the fact that the fossil record of animals and plants is full of bias’s towards organisms that have a high preservation and fossilization potential (such as hard instead of soft bodied organisms or in the case of plants abundant long lived woody plants have a much greater preservation potential than rare annual herbs).
In addition the rock record in which fossils are preserved is not constant in terms of volume over geographical areas or through time leading to further biases. It remains very difficult therefore to estimate how absolute biodiversity has altered through geological time. However, the fossil record can provide an excellent means with which to study changes in the relative diversity and relative abundance of different plant and animal groups through time as long as lithological factors can be held constant.
Such analyses enable us to track the ecological dominance of different plant groups through time and assess how climatic changes and changes in atmospheric composition affect these patterns. A geological hammer and chisel, a careful and precise paleoecological sampling strategy and repeated field seasons collecting abundant fossil plant material are the first steps and tools required to carry out such a study followed by detailed chemical, anatomical and morphological analyses of the fossils in the laboratory.
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3. Where do you study biodiversity?
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Currently my main field collecting areas are in Jameson Land East Greenland (Triassic-Jurassic fossil plants), Borneholm, Denmark (Toarcian fossil plants) and Maple Canyon, Utah (Cenomanian-Turonian fossil plants).
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4. How might your research have implications for biological conservation?
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See above.
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5. How did you become interested in science? What made you want to be a scientist, and how did you get to The Field Museum?
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 I have always been interested in science. Growing up in the country in Ireland and having a hazel wood and horsetail marsh as a playground and then while at University spending many wind blown days coring blanket bogs and fens must have sparked my interest in the history of vegetation. I have always been intrigued by the idea that every soil profile, peatbog, lake bottom and the right rocks hold an incredible history of past vegetation in the form of pollen, seeds, leaves or wood.
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