Paleoecology Laboratory
Describes global research using vegetation shifts to reconstruct local and regional changes in the landscape due to climate and/or anthropogenic influence.
Describes global research using vegetation shifts to reconstruct local and regional changes in the landscape due to climate and/or anthropogenic influence.
The Ecophysiology group studies the physiological mechanisms underlying plant responses to environmental conditions and the influence these responses have on ecological pa
EarthView Explorer computer software was designed as supplemental material for teaching and learning in the Earth Sciences for students in grades 6-12.
Environmental hypotheses of African faunal evolution propose that major faunal speciation, extinction, and innovation events during the Pliocene-Pleistocene were mediated by changes in Africa
Name | Title | Fields of interest | |
---|---|---|---|
Mukund Rao | Graduate Student | ||
![]() |
A. Park Williams | Lamont Associate Research Professor, Senior Staff | |
![]() |
Kevin Uno | Lamont Associate Research Professor | My primary research interest is in reconstructing ancient terrestrial ecosystems using light stable isotopes (H, C, N, & O), molecular biomarkers, and other geochemical tools. I also employ these tools to study modern ecosystems in East Africa. |
![]() |
Abdulhakim (Hakim) Abdi | Senior Research Staff Assistant | Biogeography, Land-use/Land-cover, Remote Sensing, GIS, Species Distribution Modeling |
![]() |
O. Roger Anderson | Adjunct Senior Research Scientist | Physiological Ecology of Eukaryotic Microbes in aquatic and terrestrial environments |
![]() |
Rosanne D'Arrigo | Lamont Research Professor |
As the American Southwest grows hotter, the risk of severe, long-lasting megadroughts rises, passing 90 percent likelihood by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current pace, a new study says. If we aggressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, however, we can cut that risk substantially, the authors write.
Lamont's Andy Juhl and a team of scientists working with the non-profit Riverkeeper conducted an unprecedented health check of the entire Hudson River system, starting at the headwaters high in the Adirondacks and going all the way to New York Harbor, where the river meets the ocean. They released their results today, giving the 315-mile-long Hudson River a spotty but mostly positive health report with some important insights.
Buried deep in seabed sediments off east Africa, scientists have uncovered a 24-million-year record of vegetation trends in the region where humans evolved. The authors say the record lends weight to the idea that we developed key traits—flexible diets, large brains, complex social structures and the ability to walk and run on two legs—while adapting to the spread of open grasslands. The study appears today in a special human-evolution issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers have predicted that as the planet is warmed by human-produced CO2, plants may add to the emissions and amplify the warming. Now, the most comprehensive global study of its kind yet suggests that this effect has limits, and that increases in plant respiration may not be as big as previously estimated. It shows that rates of increase slow in an easily predictable way as temperatures mount, in every region of earth, from tropics to tundra.
In the years before the Syrian conflict erupted, the region’s worst drought on record set in across the Levant, destroying crops and restricting water supplies in the already water-stressed region. A new study shows that that drought, from 1998-2012, wasn’t just the most severe in a century of record-keeping—it was the Levant’s most severe drought in at least 500 years and likely more than 900 years.
In an effort led by current and former Lamont Tree Ring Lab scientists, the N-TREND consortium (Northern Tree-Ring Network Development) was created to develop a global database of tree-ring research that improves on efforts for developing large-scale temperature reconstructions across the Northern Hemisphere.
The long history of severe droughts across Europe and the Mediterranean has largely been told through historical documents and ancient journals, each chronicling the impact in a geographically restricted area. Now, for the first time, an atlas based on scientific evidence provides the big picture, using tree rings to map the reach and severity of dry and wet periods across Europe and parts of North Africa and the Middle East year-by-year over the past 2,000 years.
Ancient pollen grains that were floating in the air when mammoths roamed Southern California are providing new insights into historic droughts in the region, including how a series of mega-droughts between about 27,500 and 25,500 years ago changed the ecological landscape. A new scientific paper tracks these changes and suggests that warm ocean conditions similar to what we see off Southern California today fueled that 2,000-year stretch of droughts.
Over 40 years, the scientists of the internationally renowned Lamont Tree Ring Lab have hiked the continents in search of tree-ring records. They have documented droughts that stretched for hundreds of years, dated historic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and found in trees around the world evidence of how the planet cooled and then started warming. The Lab has expanded dendrochronology’s capabilities and becme a global leader in research, training and technology.
The Amazon Rainforest sprawls across more than 2 million square miles of South America, taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen as “the lungs of the planet.” When they’re healthy, the world’s tropical forests and vegetation absorb up to 30 percent of the CO2 produced by human activities, but during droughts, that capacity falls off. To understand what that will mean as global warming produces more intense and frequent droughts, we need to understand the water and carbon cycles of the Amazon and how those cycles interact.
A new study says that global warming has measurably worsened the ongoing California drought. While scientists largely agree that natural weather variations have caused a lack of rain, an emerging consensus says that rising temperatures may be making things worse by driving moisture from plants and soil into the air. The new study is the first to estimate how much worse: as much as a quarter. The findings suggest that within a few decades, continually increasing temperatures and resulting moisture losses will push California into even more persistent aridity. The study appears this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
O. Roger Anderson is a microbiologist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who studies bacteria, amoebas, fungi and other microorganisms. Lately he has been thinking about how tiny organisms that inhabit the vast northern tundra regions could contribute to changing climate, since, like humans, they breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.
But Global Warming May Have Helped Override Some Recent Eruptions
Climate researchers have shown that big volcanic eruptions over the past 450 years have temporarily cooled weather in the tropics—but suggest that such effects may have been masked in the 20th century by rising global temperatures
![]() |
Climate and Culture Research | at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory |
![]() |
New York's Piermont Marsh | A 7,000-year Archive of Climate Change, Human Impact and Uncovered Mysteries |
![]() |
Tree Rings, Climate Change and the Rainy Season | |
![]() |
Climate is Changing Our Forests and Plants | New Evidence from Alaska and Our Own Backyard |
![]() |
African Climate Changes and Human Evolution | Public Lecture, 2004 |