Paleoecology of the Bolivian Pantanal: A 45,000 year history of vegetation and climate change in tropical South America

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.