by Brian Dermody

The European Geosciences Union conference takes place every year in Vienna. It hosts around 15,000 scientists on all topics to do with geoscience. This year I was invited to take part in one of the daily press conferences they organise. The topic of the press conference was Past civilisational resilience and collapse. 

by Brian Dermody

​Stefan Dekker and I recently attended a workshop at the ancient city of Sagalassos located high in the mountains in south-west Turkey. The idea of the meeting was to bring together researchers from a range of disciplines to understand the history of Sagalassos in the context of a complex socio-ecological system integrated within the wider Roman world. Studies of ancient societies can be extremely informative in a sustainability context as they can illustrate the long-term implications of short-term socio-ecological interactions. 

Blog post by Brian Dermody - Postdoc 

I read an article recently about a project called Orbital Insight. This is an idea to use recent, high resolution satellite imagery in addition with image recognition software to provide an up-to-date, global picture of everything from crop yields to oil surpluses (indicated by the shape of shadows on floating lids of oil tanks). The idea is that with the vast amounts of data now available and computing power to process it we can gain unprecedented insights about our planet. The founder of orbital insight, James Crawford, likened these advances to a “macroscope” that could impact our understanding of the world to a similar degree that the microscope did.

Much of these kinds of data are now openly available via the Google Earth Engine. This is a web-hosted GIS platform that exploits Googles’ ability to access pretty much any online datasets from Landsat imagery to sea surface temperature from NOAA. A high profile use of the tool recently was a paper in Science that showed global trends in deforestation and afforestation. I’d encourage anyone with an interest in these kind of datasets to go have a play. There are some nice examples of the kinds of analysis you can do on the homepage. Within the data catalog you can simply search for whichever dataset you wish to view. I searched for light and could view the DMSP-OLS Nighttime Lights Time Series. Interesting to see the big change in regions such as the Yangtze River delta! In order to have full access to all the functionality you need to apply for access as a developer. Have fun!

Blog entry by Brian Dermody - Postdoc

Most of the work we do as scientists remains within the scientific community but now and again certain topics, for whatever reason, seem to capture the public’s attention. This is happening more and more with platforms like IFLS, Radiolab and ‘celebrity’ scientists such as Neil deGrasse Tyson making a big contribution to that.   A recent paper I was an author of got a lot of media attention over the Christmas period. I was asked to write a short piece reflecting on why I think the media interest came about, how the work was interpreted and maybe some lessons learnt. The paper in question is entitled “A virtual water network of the Roman World” and was published in the journal Hydrological and Earth System Sciences.

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: