EGU session on tropical peatlands

Ian Lawson and colleagues from the UK Tropical Peat Working Group are organizing a session on “Tropical Peatlands” at EGU in April 2017. The call for abstracts is open with a deadline of 11 January 2017. All submissions welcome! The details of the session are here – the hope is to stimulate comparisons of peatlands … Read more

Impact of fires on peatlands in Indonesia

Ian Lawson has contributed to a blog post for the Journal of Applied Ecology on the impact of the ongoing destruction of Indonesia peatlands on the research community. With SE Asian peatlands rapidly diminishing, the importance of Amazonian and African peatlands as records of tropical environmental and ecological change is heightened. You can read the … Read more

GTOE conference, Gottingen

Katy Roucoux, Tom Kelly and Freddie Draper presented their research on peatlands in the Pastaza-Marañón Foreland Basin of Peru at the European Conference of Tropical Ecology. A fuller report can be found here.

Tropical wetlands in a global context: PAGES C-PEAT meeting

PAGES C-PEAT is a new working group on the long-term history of peatlands around the globe. Drawing mainly on geological (including Holocene) perspectives, the group aims to synthesize our understanding of past change in peatland ecosystems and use that to help predict their future. Ian Lawson presented a summary of the group’s work on Pastaza-Marañón … Read more

INQUA congress

Ian Lawson presented a summary of the group’s work in Peru at the Congress of the International Union for Quaternary Science in Nagoya, Japan.

Updates on deforestation in Loreto, Perú

Two recent reports suggest that the potential threats to Amazonian peatlands from deforestation for oil palms and cacao, and gold mining and other extractive industries, are growing. The EIA published a particularly critical report last month, and MAAP also claims to have found evidence of significant deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon in its analyses of LandSat imagery. This raises the concern that … Read more

Congratulations to Dr Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly passed his PhD viva at the University of Leeds, with well-deserved commendations from his examiners Rob Marchant (University of York) and David Galbraith (Leeds). His supervisors (Ian Lawson, Katy Roucoux and Tim Baker) are very proud! Tom has already led or contributed to several papers through his research, and we look forward to … Read more