Paleoecology of the Bolivian Pantanal: A 45,000 year history of vegetation and climate change in tropical South America
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Date
2009Author
Whitney, Bronwen Sarah
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Abstract
This thesis is formatted in journal style, and as is typical of research
submitted to peer-reviewed journals, some of the data included in the three research
chapters have been collected by collaborating authors. These authors are listed at the
beginning of each chapter, and the contribution of each is detailed below.
Chapter 2 incorporates a vegetation survey around the shores of the field site,
Laguna La Gaiba, conducted by Ezequiel Chavez and René Guillén of the Muséo de
Historía Natural Noel Kempff Mercado, Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and Michael J. Burn
differentiated the pollen of Moraceae and Urticaceae in twenty-five horizons. Toby
Pennington of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, has been crucial to data
interpretation and discussion.
The research in Chapter 3 also relies on the field surveys of Ezequiel Chavez
and René Guillén, as well as the finer-scale pollen differentiation provided by
Michael J. Burn. This chapter also includes carbon isotope data obtained by Neil J.
Loader and Alayne Street-Perrott, Swansea University, Wales, and elemental data
collected by Francis E. Mayle and Michael H. Marshall (Aberystwyth) at the Itrax XRF scanner facility, University of Aberystwyth. As in the preceding chapter, Toby
Pennington has played an integral role in the ecological interpretation and climatic
significance of changes in the inundation-tolerant forest.
The data obtained for Chapter 4 were collected entirely by my own hand, but
the interpretation of these data was improved by contributed work of my co-authors
in the previous two chapters.