Yesterday, the 30th Annual Congress of the European Association of Archaeologists started in Rome.
I will present my work on the European Acheulean tomorrow at 8:30 in room CU013-FL2-Rasetti, within session 364: “Modeling Pleistocene Survival Dynamics: Ecology, Energetics and Evolution.”
I also have a poster about pastclim and tidysdm (our R packages to easily use palaeoclimatic reconstructions and perform palaeoecological modelling). You can read it here on ResearchGate.
For the second year in a row, I will be involved in the Cambridge Festival for an event I am in love with:
Board games night at the Museum of Zoology
6:30pm-9:30pm on Wednesday 20 March
Downing Street, Cambridge.
Age 18+. Bar open and snacks available to buy on the night.
Visit the Museum of Zoology after hours for animal-themed board games. Grab a drink, play strategy games, create canine chaos or battle to be the best at Hungry Hungry Hippos or explore new habitats every time the climate changes. Meet the team from Waterstones Cambridge and try out some of their animal-related games too!
I will present Climate Change, the board game inspired by my work in the Department of Zoology. I will lead a demo game and help people through playing.
Join us by buying a ticket here!
Update: a few pictures of the event
I am delighted to share an amazing news! Today I started a new position at the Natural History Museum in London.
I will work in the Plants under Pressure group, led by Dr. Neil Brummitt. I will study the biodiversity of plants in Tropical Africa, and the results of my research will be used by the local communities to restore forests in former mining areas.
I am particularly excited about this aspect. It is the first time that my work will directly inform conservation efforts, and it is a wonderful opportunity to make a difference (little steps can go a long way). I am equally excited to join the Museum: it is an amazing institution that has the power to inspire such a large community.
The project is funded by a Knowledge Assets Grant Fund, i.e. funding given by the UK government to develop early-stage intellectual resources towards a wider adoption or commercialisation.
Yesterday I was invited by the Cambridge Museum of Zoology to give an online talk for the Arthur Rank Hospice.
The title was “Looking into the past to inform the future”. We chatted about the climate changes that happened thousands of years ago; how Neanderthals, Aurochs and Yellow Warblers reacted to them; and how these different examples can be useful in the current climate changes.
It was wonderful: the audience was very interested, they asked me many questions and I had a lot of fun! I am very grateful to Sara Steele from the Cambridge Museum of Zoology for inviting me.
If you are free today at 4 pm (UK time), join us for the first Computational and Digital Archaeology seminar of the term at the Department of Archaeology, Cambridge.
Palaeoecology made easy: two new tools to make the best use of big data in archaeology
Monday, 9 October, 2023 – 16:00 to 17:00 (UK time)
I will be talking about palaeoecology, #paleoclimate, and big data in archaeology. I will also present two new tools that I co-developed to make palaeoecological analyses easier: pastclim and tidysdm.
Abstract: In recent years, we witnessed the publication of both large datasets of archaeological occurrences and palaeoclimatic data series covering hundreds of thousands of years. This opened the door to new, exciting possibilities in the field of palaeoecology.
To make the best use of such data, I co-developed two new R packages that facilitate their use and allow simpler pipelines for their analyses.
The first package is pastclim. It is designed to easily access and manipulate climatic data and palaeoclimatic/future climate reconstructions. It contains a set of functions to recover the climate for time periods of interest, crop to specific areas, extract data from locations scattered in space and/or time, retrieve time series from individual sites, and manage the ice or land coverage.
The second package is tidysdm. The rationale behind it is to take advantage of the tidymodels framework in R to perform species distribution modelling (also known as habitat suitability/ecological niche modelling). This is the first software specifically designed to work with occurrences scattered in time, a task that with other tools, is either impossible or requires extensive tweaking. The integration with pastclim allows hassle-free access and handling of climatic data from the past, the present, and the future.
I will also present some applications of such tools, as an example of the new opportunities they could offer to scholars studying the past (e.g. archaeologists, archaeozoologists, palaeoecologists, palaeoanthropologists).
Event location: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Seminar Room
Join online: https://zoom.us/j/94826858436?pwd=N1JCeU9Id3dUdkJ4ZDVyUjhtQ0FMQT09
Event series: Computational and Digital Archaeology Laboratory Series
Update: a couple of pictures of my talk
