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  The world of Geosciences

Roman resilience to environmental change

5/28/2014

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Blog entry by Brian Dermody - PhD student


What brought about the fall of the Roman Empire? That is a question that has occupied Roman scholars for centuries. An equally important question is what enabled the Roman civilisation to last so long in a region of highly variable climate and dynamic landscapes?

Environmental Setting

The heart of the Roman Empire was the Mediterranean and its surrounding ecosystems. Much of Mediterranean is marginal for agriculture with low rainfall and highly variable climate making droughts and famine a real and constant threat. Equally, proxy data show that climate in the Mediterranean underwent long-term changes during the lifetime of the Roman Empire (Fig. 1). Land degradation was also a serious problem in the Roman period, particularly with a shift to large-scale farming in the Late Republican period to feed a growing urban populous. The impact of land degradation in Italy was outlined in the writings of Lucretius dating from 99 – 55 BC:


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Goats in vans in South-Eastern Spain

5/21/2014

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Blog entry by Mart Verwijmeren -  PhD student

Plant facilitation under drought and grazing stress

In our research project we look at how plants can work together to survive in very stressful environments. Much empirical work already showed that plants can facilitate each other’s survival in grazed or very dry environments. Big shrubs can for example protect young plants against grazers, thereby increasing survival of young plants. Also, big shrubs might provide shade to decrease drought stress for young neighbouring saplings. In my PhD project we look at how facilitation between plants might disappear when both grazing stress and drought stress become very severe. We expect that with increasing stress facilitation firstly becomes more important, but that at very high stress positive interaction will disappear again. Pinpointing the stress level at which facilitation wanes is crucial to better understand future land degradation in arid ecosystems. 

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Overview of our fieldwork site in the region Murcia.

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The Biebrza – one of the last undisturbed extensive valley mires in Europe

5/21/2014

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Blog entry by Floris Keizer - Junior Lecturer / Researcher

The marriage between the Environmental Sciences group of Utrecht University and one of the last undisturbed river floodplains in Central Europe has been a long one. Since the late 80’s, researchers from our group have visited the river floodplains and peatlands and brought it to the attention of the scientific community. The Biebrza valley in North-Eastern Poland is one of the last extensive undrained valley mires in Central Europe. The natural character of the valley peatlands is reflected in a very regular pattern of peat-forming plant communities (fig. 1).

Biebrza floodplain
Fig. 1. The Biebrza River with clearly visible pattern of different vegetation types perpendicular to the river. (source: Google Maps).

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Welcome!

5/20/2014

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Welcome to the blog of the Environmental Sciences group of the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University. Through this blog we – PhD candidates, junior researchers and post-docs – would like to tell you about our ongoing research.

Our research group is very diverse in nature, which will be reflected by this blog. Some of us construct computer models, to get an improved understanding of the systems we study and explain their past behaviour and assess their future development. Other researchers spend a lot of time gathering data in the field or in the laboratory, while yet others analyse large, existing databases to test hypotheses (or disprove them…) and formulate new hypotheses. The strength of our research group lies in combining these methods and applying them to different topics.

A wide variety of topics is studied within our group. We study the climate in the Roman period, but at the same time try to predict how the climate will be in the future. We also investigate the potential role of pesticides in enhanced bee mortality, and how environmental change can push drylands towards a critical threshold beyond which these ecosystems develop to a bare desert. We carry out studies on the eco-hydrology of flood plains in Thailand and Poland. This is only a small selection of the topics that we study and that we will write about in the coming months.

We would like to tell you about the who, what, why and how of our research. Why are we doing the research that we do? What are the practical day-to-day things when doing research? Where are the systems that we study? What are our findings? Very soon you will be able to read all about it.   

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