For posts for the Three Lakes Biodiversity project see the menu on the right.

Introduction to the Blog Pages

These webpages are a series of blog posts that refer principally to my work on the palaeoecology of West Cork. As time progresses my focus of study will move to various sites across West Cork.

Palaeoecology is the ecology of the past, generally the distant past, as in ancient.

In reality of course it all connects seamlessly in a long unbroken timeline, so what we see today, is yesterday’s future and tomorrow’s past.

It is the traces that environments leave that can be used to get some understanding of what environments existed and what life was in them at any particular time, and if we can extract a whole series of these traces through time, then we can maybe see how landscapes and populations interact and change, and maybe understand why.

This photo shows a beach on the shore of Bantry Bay in which we can see the traces of at least 4 different environments, from different times, all lying together. The enormous 30m mound of boulder clay deposited under the 300m thick ice sheet from maybe 18,000 years ago; a woodland floor that grew in the valley after the ice but before the sea levels reached their present state (right inset), todays beach, and the sediments of interspersed grey mud and yellow silt from 300 million years ago when this area was an arid plain being washed by periodic floods (left inset).

Beach beach on the southern shore of Bantry Bay.

Ecology deals with the living systems, organisms and the environment they inhabit, and the chemical and energy flows into and out of the system. Ecologists study these systems in the here and now, and sometimes over a period of time, but what is lacking is a long term picture of how the system behaves over a long period.

Palaeoecology can give just that, a long term picture of the ecosystem over long periods of time - hundreds or even thousands of years. Even, using geological remains, hundreds of millions of years. But palaeoecology generally lacks the facility to understand all the organisms and all aspects of the environments, because not all of these are preserved.

Thus the methods and principles of both ecology and palaeoecology are complementary, and each can be used to expand the scope of the other.

By combining knowledge and understanding of present day ecology, with the information gleaned from the sediments and fossil remains from the past, we can put together a picture of the environment at that place at a particular time. This can be combined with knowledge of more wide reaching situations, like global climate, changes in atmospheric constituents and so on, to fill in some details and build a more complete picture.

My personal interest is in discovering what was alive at those various periods, and what the environment was like at different times, with a focus on appreciating the variety and diversity of organisms.

When I see something in the landscape, I ask myself, and want to know, what it is, why is it there, how did it come to be, how long has it been there, what was there before it. I want to create a picture of that thing, place, or feature, as it was before. A large scale background picture can be created, either through research or examination or enquiry, based on clues and discoveries. Then using knowledge, appreciation, and understanding of the natural world, we can go a long way to filling in the details.