This year, for Department Day, our PhD student Zhe Xue presented a poster on his work on leopards. It’s always great to see something you have contributed to being presented publicly!
Zhe’s project builds on the work of Sidney Leedham, our former Part-II student who performed ecological analyses of different leopard subspecies (you can read more here).
Yesterday I had another opportunity to do outreach about climate change with two groups of Year 8 students (12-13 years old), at the Museum of Zoology, University of Cambridge.
As usual, the session started with a short talk explaining the relationship between climate change, evolution and extinction. After that, the students had explored these tipics by playing “Climate change” my board game.
Learning how climate changes impact animal species gives a better understanding of the actual threats linked to the current climate emergency. Understanding such processes through a game makes the students’ experience more engaging and less stressful than it would be when following a lecture or a talk.
A couple of days ago, my PI, Prof. Andrea Manica (University of Cambridge), presented a webinar. He talked about pastclim, our piece of software to easily access and manage palaeoclimatic data. He gave a general overview about the palaeoclimatic reconstructions included in it, presented the package and gave examples of how palaeoclimate can be used to address questions related to evolution, palaeoecology and migrations.
Here is the video of the event. You will see some of my work presented there (especially my paper on the palaeoecology of European ungulates).
The seminar was part of the project “Mapping Ancient Africa: Climate, Vegetation & Humans“, a multi-year project funded by the Palaeoclimate commission (PALCOM) and Humans & Biosphere commission (HABCOM) within the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA).
Yesterday I was invited by Enza Spinapolice (La Sapienza University of Rome) to give a seminar for her Archaeology students (2nd year).
My talk was about “Numerical analysis in archaeology” and was followed by many questions. I hope I have convinced the students that the analysis of numerical data is an approach that can be useful to investigate our past.
Thank you Enza for giving me this opportunity!
It is now out in the blog of the journal Ecography, a post that I have written about pastclim, our R package facilitating the access and use of palaeoclimatic data. You can read it at this link.
