9 - Bringing Palaeoecology Alive

Summary

For many years, I ran a course on ‘palaeoecology’ at the University of Bergen, in western Norway. Palaeoecology has an unbroken tradition here, since Knut Fægri in the 1940s. Palaeoecology is the study of past ecological events and processes behind current ecosystems. We cannot see the past directly, but must reconstruct it from evidence stored in sedimentary and archaeological archives, rather like a cold-case detective investigation. Of course, this evidence is incomplete, and we use ‘proxies’ as clues about past ecological conditions. Plant proxies are usually pollen grains and larger remains such as seeds, fruits and leaves (macrofossils). Animal proxies are often remains of invertebrates, but fish scales and vertebrate bones are also studied. Palaeoecological archives are usually lake or bog sediments that have continuously deposited a timeline of events and ecological developments through the past. The students learn how we collect sediments with a coring device that samples this time sequence (Figure 9.1).