Cathy Whitlock

Last updated
Cathy Whitlock
Born
Cathy Whitlock Barnosky

Syracuse, New York
Alma mater Colorado College (BS)
University of Washington (PhD)
Awards Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2018)
Scientific career
Institutions Montana State University
University of Oregon
University of Michigan
Trinity College Dublin
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Thesis Late-Quaternary vegetational and climatic history of southwestern Washington  (1983)
Website www.montana.edu/earthsciences/directory/1524735/cathy-whitlock

Cathy Lynn Whitlock is an American Earth Scientist and Professor at Montana State University. She is interested in Quaternary environmental change and palaeoclimatology and was a lead author of the 2017 Montana Climate Assessment. Whitlock has served as president of the American Quaternary Association and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.

Contents

Early life and education

Whitlock was born in Syracuse, New York. [1] [2] She grew up in Syracuse and Denver. Whitlock studied at Colorado College and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. [1] She was a graduate student at the University of Washington. [1] [2] In 1976 Whitlock was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and worked at the University of Michigan. She joined Trinity College Dublin in 1983 on a NATO postdoctoral fellowship, based in the department of botany. [1]

Career and research

In 1984 Whitlock returned to the United States to take up a tenure-track position at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. [1] She is a palaeoecologist who studies environmental change over centuries and millennia. [3] She moved to the University of Oregon in 1990, and was made Head of the Department of Geography in 1999. [1] She studies the relationship between fire, climate, humans and vegetation over a range of timescales. She is interested in how these relationships change over different timescales. [3]

Whitlock concentrates on the material that is found in lakes, extracting sediment cores that contain the fossils of pollen and particulate charcoal. Pollen grains can provide information about the plants that lived in the lake, meaning Whitlock can work out the vegetation and climate. By studying the charcoal in the sediments, Whitlock can track past fire. She has analysed the sediment cores in both wetlands and natural lakes. [1] She uses the information she can extract from sediment cores to reconstruct historical vegetation, fire and climate. [1] After the Yellowstone fires of 1988, Whitlock developed tools to reconstruct previous fires using the charcoal particulates contained within lake sediments. She monitored the lakes that were close to the Yellowstone fires for ten years, studying the amount of charcoal in small lakes in burned and unburned waterbeds. [3] She studied the origins and amount of charcoal in these lakes and established the way that charcoal had been transported from the lake to the sediment cores she extracted. [3] She compared the charcoal abundance during the 1988 fires to historical fires at the Yellowstone National Park. [3] The methods she developed are still being used by fire scientists in a Global Charcoal Database. [1] [4]

In 2004 Whitlock joined Montana State University, where she acts as co-director of the Montana Institute on Ecosystems. [1] [5] She studied the impact of Rocky Mountain uplift on the climate of the Western United States. [1] Whitlock believes that paleoecology is a powerful tool that should be used for the good of the planet, and her work in palaeo-inspired conservation is inspired by Herb Wright and Estella Leopold. She has also analysed vegetation in Patagonia, the impact of New Zealand fires on shrubland and agricultural land in Sicily. [1] Whitlock studied the sediment cores in Gorgo Basso, monitoring the pollen levels. [3] She identified that the Quercus ilex was the dominant tree in the landscape, until the beginning of the Roman period, when centuries of land use caused a rapid decline. [3] Deforestation in New Zealand coincides with the arrival of the Māori people, and continued when the Europeans in the 1840s. [3] She has used future climate projections to predict that rising temperatures will increase the prevalence of wildfires. [6]

She was the lead author of the 2017 Montana Climate Assessment. [1] [7] [8] In 2018 Whitlock was the first scientist based in a Montana institution to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. [9] [10] She serves on the editorial boards of the journals The Holocene , Quaternary Research and Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology . [11] [12] [13]

Awards and honors

Related Research Articles

The Younger Dryas was a return to glacial conditions which temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming after the Last Glacial Maximum. The Younger Dryas was the last stage of the Pleistocene epoch and it preceded the current, warmer Holocene epoch. The Younger Dryas was the most severe and long lasting of several interruptions to the warming of the Earth's climate, and it was preceded by the Late Glacial Interstadial.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Palynology</span> Study of dust

Palynology is the "study of dust" or of "particles that are strewn". A classic palynologist analyses particulate samples collected from the air, from water, or from deposits including sediments of any age. The condition and identification of those particles, organic and inorganic, give the palynologist clues to the life, environment, and energetic conditions that produced them.

Carolina bays are elliptical to circular depressions concentrated along the Atlantic seaboard within coastal New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and north Florida. In Maryland, they are called Maryland basins. Within the Delmarva Peninsula, they and other coastal ponds are also called Delmarva bays.

Tollmann's bolide hypothesis is a hypothesis presented by Austrian palaeontologist Edith Kristan-Tollmann and geologist Alexander Tollmann in 1994. The hypothesis postulates that one or several bolides struck the Earth around 7640 ± 200 years BCe, with a much smaller one approximately 3150 ± 200 BCE. The hypothesis tries to explain early Holocene extinctions and possibly legends of the Universal Deluge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Proxy (climate)</span> Preserved physical characteristics allowing reconstruction of past climatic conditions

In the study of past climates ("paleoclimatology"), climate proxies are preserved physical characteristics of the past that stand in for direct meteorological measurements and enable scientists to reconstruct the climatic conditions over a longer fraction of the Earth's history. Reliable global records of climate only began in the 1880s, and proxies provide the only means for scientists to determine climatic patterns before record-keeping began.

The Older Dryas was a stadial (cold) period between the Bølling and Allerød interstadials, about 14,000 years Before Present, towards the end of the Pleistocene. Its date is not well defined, with estimates varying by 400 years, but its duration is agreed to have been around 200 years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paleolimnology</span> Scientific study of ancient lakes and streams

Paleolimnology is a scientific sub-discipline closely related to both limnology and paleoecology. Paleolimnological studies focus on reconstructing the past environments of inland waters using the geologic record, especially with regard to events such as climatic change, eutrophication, acidification, and internal ontogenic processes.

The Greater Yellowstone Coalition is a conservation organization protecting the lands, waters and wildlife of the 20-million-acre (81,000 km2) Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

Sally P. Horn is a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her work in Costa Rica and other tropical regions has been featured in a number of publications, including National Geographic. She has published over 100 articles relating to paleolimnology and biogeography. She is director of the University of Tennessee Laboratory of Paleoenvironmental Research and associate director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Science. Horn was named one of the first University of Tennessee Chancellors Professors in 2009.

Dr. Margaret Bryan Davis is an American palynologist and paleoecologist, who used pollen data to study the vegetation history of the past 21,000 years. She showed conclusively that temperate- and boreal-forest species migrated at different rates and in different directions while forming a changing mosaic of communities. Early in her career, she challenged the standard methods and prevailing interpretations of the data and fostered rigorous analysis in palynology. As a leading figure in ecology and paleoecology, she served as president of the Ecological Society of America and the American Quaternary Association and as chair of the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. In 1982 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and, in 1993, received the Eminent Ecologist Award from the Ecological Society of America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postglacial vegetation</span>

Postglacial vegetation refers to plants that colonize the newly exposed substrate after a glacial retreat. The term "postglacial" typically refers to processes and events that occur after the departure of glacial ice or glacial climates.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Herb Wright</span>

Herbert Edgar Wright Jr was an American Quaternary scientist. He contributed to understanding of landscape history and environmental changes over the past 100,000 years in many parts of the world. He studied arid-region geomorphology and landscape evolution, as well as glacial geology and climate history. The study of these topics led him to the study of vegetation development and environmental history and allowed him to define the timing and mechanisms of climate-driven vegetational shifts in North America during the last 18,000 years and to recognize the role of natural fire in the dynamics of northern coniferous forests. He applied these insights to wilderness conservation and landscape management. He covered many other aspects of paleoecology including lake development and paleolimnology, and the history and development of the vast patterned peatlands of Minnesota and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Although his work was concentrated in Minnesota, he was also involved in a major synthesis of global paleoclimatology. Beyond Minnesota and the Great Lakes region, Wright studied a wide range of research questions elsewhere in North America, and in the Near East, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Antarctica. He advised over 75 graduate students and mentored many more students, visitors, and colleagues world-wide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paleo-climate of the Snake River Plain</span>

The paleo-climate of the Snake River Plain in southern Idaho, U.S., was much wetter and milder than today’s climate. During the Pliocene, the presence of a large lake provided habitat for fish. As the climate started to dry during the Pleistocene, vegetation similar to the present-day flora developed, although its geographical distribution was markedly different. Further drying occurred during the North American glaciation period that followed, resulting in the general aridity of the region today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacquelyn Gill</span> Paleoecologist

Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist and Assistant Professor of climate science at the University of Maine. She has worked on such as the relationship between megafauna and vegetation in the Pleistocene, and the sediment cores of Jamaica. Gill is also a science communicator on climate change.

Jessica E. Tierney (born 1982) is an American paleoclimatologist who has worked with geochemical proxies such as marine sediments, mud, and TEX86, to study past climate in East Africa. Her papers have been cited more than 2,500 times; her most cited work is Northern Hemisphere Controls on Tropical Southeast African Climate During the Past 60,000 Years. Tierney is currently an associate professor of geosciences and the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair in Integrative Science at the University of Arizona and faculty affiliate in the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment Tierney is the first climatologist to win NSF's Alan T Waterman Award (2022) since its inception in 1975.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julie Brigham-Grette</span> American glacial geologist

Julie Brigham-Grette is a glacial geologist and a professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she co-directs the Joseph Hartshorn Quaternary Laboratory. Her research expertise is in glacial geology and paleoclimatology; she has made important contributions to Arctic marine and terrestrial paleoclimate records of late Cenozoic to recent, the evolution of the Arctic climate, especially in the Beringia/Bering Strait region, and was a leader of the international Lake El’gygytgyn Drilling Project in northeastern Russia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paleohydrology</span> Study of hydrology over geological time

Paleohydrology, or palaeohydrology, is the scientific study of the movement, distribution, and quality of water on Earth during previous periods of its history. The discipline uses indirect evidence to infer changes in deposition rates, the existence of flooding, changes in sea levels, changes in groundwater levels and the erosion of rocks. It also deals with alterations in the floral and faunal assemblages which have come about in previous periods because of changes in hydrology.

Richard Langton Reese was an environmental activist who founded the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and an alpinist who participated in the North Face Grand Teton rescue in 1967.

Sherilyn Fritz is known for her research on paleoclimate and paleoecology, with a particular focus on the use of diatoms to reconstruct past environmental conditions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Montana State University Archives and Special Collections</span>

The Montana State University Archives and Special Collections, also known as the Merrill G. Burlingame Archives and Special Collections, is located in Bozeman, Montana. The archives is on the second floor of the Renne Library on the Montana State University-Bozeman campus and consists of materials relating to the history of the American West, trout and salmonids, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and other topics.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 "Cathy Whitlock". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  2. 1 2 "Department of Earth Sciences | Montana State University". www.montana.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 National Academy of Sciences (2019-04-27), Cathy Whitlock – Looking Backward, Thinking Forward: Perspectives of a Paleoecologist , retrieved 2019-05-04
  4. ↑ "Paleofire". www.paleofire.org. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  5. ↑ "Cathy Whitlock | Institute on Ecosystems". montanaioe.org. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  6. ↑ "Dr. Cathy Whitlock Presents... – Montana INBRE | Montana State University". www.inbre.montana.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  7. ↑ Wade, Alisa A.; Silverman, Nick; Maxwell, Bruce D.; Cross, Wyatt F.; Whitlock, Cathy (2017). "2017 Montana Climate Assessment: Stakeholder driven, science informed": 1–269. doi: 10.15788/M2WW8W .{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  8. ↑ "Home | MCA". montanaclimate.org. Retrieved 2020-02-22.
  9. ↑ "Cathy Whitlock, Montana State University". EurekAlert!. Retrieved 2019-05-04.[ permanent dead link ]
  10. ↑ "Cathy Whitlock – PCOSUW | Montana State University". www.montana.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  11. ↑ "The Holocene". SAGE Publications Inc. 2015-10-29. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  12. ↑ Quaternary Science Reviews Editorial Board.
  13. ↑ Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology Editorial Board.
  14. ↑ "MSU IoE Director Cathy Whitlock Named AAAS Fellow | Montana NSF EPSCoR". www.mtnsfepscor.org. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  15. ↑ "Ten pioneers in technology, biodiversity to receive Stibitz, Wilson awards Oct. 1". Montana State University. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  16. ↑ "Cathy Whitlock AWG Professional Excellence Award winner | Institute on Ecosystems". montanaioe.org. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  17. ↑ "GSA Fellowship". www.geosociety.org. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  18. ↑ "USNC/INQUA". sites.nationalacademies.org. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  19. ↑ "Extraordinary Ordinary Women of MSU Profiles – PCOSUW | Montana State University". www.montana.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  20. ↑ "MSU's Cathy Whitlock named Montana University System Regents Professor". Montana State University. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
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