michelaleonardi Research, Seminars

Talk for the Computational and Digital Archaeology seminar series, Cambridge

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

michelaleonardi Research

pastclim at INQUA 2023 in Rome

Yesterday I had a poster about pastclim (our R package to easily access and use palaeoclimatic reconstructions) at the Congress of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA 2023) in Rome. It was during session Session 82: “Data science and paleoecology: current intersections and advances”.

At this link, you can find the abstract and more information about the session. And if you are interested in reading the poster, you can find it here on ResearchGate.

michelaleonardi Research

The palaeoecology of European ungulates at INQUA 2023 in Rome

In these days, there is the Congress of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA 2023) in Rome.

Yesterday morning I gave a presentation about “Time matters: testing for ecological niche changes in Late Quaternary European ungulates“. It was based on our work on the ungulates (scientific paper, blog post), but I have also presented a sneak peek of a resource that will be out very soon, so… watch this space!

Here are a few pictures of my presentation, and a happy INQUA mammoth picture taken after the end of it!

michelaleonardi Research

Webinar about pastclim, an R package to work with palaeoclimate

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).

Mapping Ancient Africa: Andrea Manica “pastclim 1.2: an R package for paleoclimatic reconstructions”

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).