Baneet Kaur

Areas of interest

Palaeoecology
Palaeoclimate
Tropical ecosystems
Ecosystem change
Amazonian forest-savannas

Research projects

Holocene environmental history of the seasonally-flooded savannas of Amazonian Bolivia

This NERC-funded PhD project investigates the Holocene environmental history of the Llanos de Moxos (LM), a seasonally flooded forest-savanna mosaic in Northeastern Bolivia on the edge of the Amazonia, roughly the size of England. The project aims to determine how climate change, fluvial geomorphology, neotectonics, and pre-Columbian (pre-AD1492) land use have interacted to shape the LM's forest-savanna mosaic through the Holocene. Although the regional climate is wet enough to support rainforest, the landscape is dominated by open savanna, shaped by impermeable clay soils, strongly seasonal rainfall and flooding. A multi-proxy approach, using leaf-wax hydrogen and carbon isotopes, XRF elemental geochemistry, fossil pollen, diatoms and macroscopic charcoal, will be applied to two lake sediment cores, Laguna Elisa and Laguna Cerrito, which capture contrasting parts of the LM landscape. This will allow vegetation change over the past ~ 8,000 years to be reconstructed in detail.

Supervisors:

Professor Frank Mayle (University of Reading)

Dr Stuart Black (University of Reading)

Umberto Lomdardo (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Background

I hold a first class honours BSc in Physical Geography with a Year Abroad from the University of Leicester. I then completed an MPhil at Leicester, characterising the vegetation components of neotropical peatlands in Colombia through pollen, plant macro-remains and organic geochemistry (pyrolysis GC-MS and FTIR). During this time I undertook a Turing-funded placement at the Universidad de Pamplona, Colombia, investigating high-Andean Espeletia. I have fieldwork experience in the Amazon rainforest and Andean páramos.