SORRY: CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION (Last installment
May 3, 2006)
THE BASICS:
I am interested in almost any aspect of the natural world, having conducted formal and informal field studies of nectar-feeding bats and Heliconia flowers on South Pacific islands, intertidal snail ecology and harbor porpoise anatomy on the coast of Maine, spotted salamander migration and ground-dwelling bee behavior in the Adirondacks, exploding crater lakes in Cameroon, and conch fisheries in the Bahamas. However, my main field of research is paleolimnology; the study of lake ecosystems on time scales ranging from decades to millenia, in my case through the study of microscopic fossils in lake sediment cores. Most often, I use the remains of diatoms (single-celled algae with glassy, decay-resistant shells or "frustules") to reconstruct the history of chemical and/or physical conditions in lakes, and from that I try to infer information about past human activites in the watershed, food web dynamics, climate change,solar variability, evolution, and whatever else can be gleaned from the sediment record. Most of my paleo research has been done on Great Lakes of the East African Rift Valley region, but I've also worked on Cameroon's crater lakes and various waters in Sweden, North Carolina, and the Adirondacks. Whenever possible, I try to involve undergraduate students in my investigations. The links below will eventually expand on these activities.