Biogeography at LSU

Biogeography at LSU is distinguished by its orientation towards Quaternary paleoenvironmental reconstruction and global change studies. During the past 14 years, faculty research and publications have focused on the following areas:

• Quaternary climate history and biological diversification in the neotropics, especially the Amazon Basin;
• Postglacial vegetation dynamics of the boreal forest and temperate mixed forest of Canada;
• Pollen records of Quaternary vegetational changes in China;
• Reconstructing the Holocene history of hurricane disturbance and vegetational response from lake and marsh sediment records along the U.S. Gulf Coast and Atlantic coast;
• Pollen studies of tropical and subtropical ice cores in South America and China;
• Monsoon climate changes and vegetation history of the Tibetan Plateau.

Topics of student research and theses/dissertations, in addition to those directly relating to the above faculty research projects, include, for example: Holocene paleoenvironmental changes in Cambodia; Holocene vegetational history of the Cajun Prairie in southwestern Louisiana; Holocene climate change and human disturbance in the subalpine forests of Fujian in southeastern China; and long-term dynamics of forest fragments in the Atlantic forests of SE Brazil.

Most of the faculty and graduate student projects have been supported by research and dissertation grants from the NSF, NOAA, NGS, AAG, GSA, Sigma Xi, and the Risk Prediction Initiative of the Bermuda Biological Station for Research (BBSR-RPI).

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Field and Laboratory Facilities

Biogeography at LSU is distinguished by its orientation towards Quaternary paleoenvironmental studies. We are among only a few geography departments in the United States that have the capability and expertise to undertake full-scale palynological and paleoecological studies - a powerful tool in the study of vegetation dynamics, climatic changes, and human environment interactions. Lake-coring field work and pollen-analytical laboratory work are an important component of biogeographic research at LSU.

The Department of Geography and Anthropology at LSU has a well-equipped Biogeography and Quaternary Paleoecology Lab that occupies 1,000 square feet of space in the Howe-Russell Geoscience Complex. It is equipped with four fume hoods for processing pollen and sediment samples; three research-grade optical microscopes (two Nikon Optiphot and one Olympus BHS) for pollen counting, one of which is mounted with a Microflex HFX-II camera system for photomicrography; one dissecting microscope; an electronic balance; an oven; two muffle furnaces; four centrifuges; and camera systems for sediment core photography. The lab also houses a modern pollen reference collection consisting of over 2,500 temperate and tropical pollen taxa from North America, South America, and East Asia, and a large collection of Chinese palynological literature and geoscience journals and books.

Field equipment includes a variety of Livingstone-type piston corers, a Russian-type peat auger, an Acker diamond core drill for hard-rock drilling, 50 m of extension rods and casing, an Ekman's dredge, an electronic depth finder (sonar), two Garmin Global Positioning Systems (GPS), a laser range finder, four rubber boats, and an outboard motor.

The lab has two Pentium computers, a 1200 dpi scanner, and two LaserJet printers. The lab's computers are interfaced with the Intergraph Mini Computer System in the Computer-Aided Design and Geographic Information Systems (CADGIS) Lab and other hardware in the department's Computer Mapping Sciences (CMS) Lab for data handling and analysis. TILIA software is available for the plotting of pollen diagrams.