Palynology is the study of microorganisms and microscopic fragments of mega-organisms that are composed of acid-resistant organic material and occur in sediments, sedimentary rocks, and even some metasedimentary rocks. Palynomorphs are the microscopic, acid-resistant organic remains and debris produced by a wide variety plants, animals, and Protista that have existed since the late Proterozoic.
Paleoecology is the study of interactions between organisms and/or interactions between organisms and their environments across geologic timescales. As a discipline, paleoecology interacts with, depends on and informs a variety of fields including paleontology, ecology, climatology and biology.
Sir Harry Godwin, FRS was a prominent English botanist and ecologist of the 20th century. He is considered to be an influential peatland scientist, who coined the phrase "peat archives" in 1981. He had a long association with Clare College, Cambridge.
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.
Arthur Roy ClaphamCBE, FRS, was a British botanist. Born in Norwich and educated at Downing College, Cambridge, Clapham worked at Rothamsted Experimental Station as a crop physiologist (1928–30), and then took a teaching post in the botany department at Oxford University. He was Professor of Botany at Sheffield University 1944–69 and vice chancellor of the university during the 1960s. He coauthored the Flora of the British Isles, which was the first, and for several decades the only, comprehensive flora of the British Isles published in 1952 and followed by new editions in 1962 and 1987. In response to a request from Arthur Tansley, he coined the term ecosystem in the early 1930s.
Charles Henry Gimingham was a British botanist at the University of Aberdeen, patron of the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, former president of the British Ecological Society, and one of the leading researchers of heathlands and heathers.
Johannes Iversen was a Danish palaeoecologist and plant ecologist.
Daniel Archibald Livingstone was the James B Duke Professor Emeritus and research professor, in the Department of Biology at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Livingstone studied at McGill and Dalhousie Universities before joining Ed Deevey's research group as a PhD student at Yale University.
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.
Michael Charles Faraday Proctor PhD was an English botanist and plant ecologist, lecturer, scientific author based at the University of Exeter. He retired from his post as Reader in Plant Ecology at Exeter University in 1994.
Winifred Anne Tutin FRS was a British limnologist and biologist.
Eduard Meine van Zinderen Bakker was a Dutch-born South African palynologist who made significant contributions to the fields of plant ecology, palynology and palaeo-ecology of Africa.
Katherine Jane Willis, Baroness Willis of Summertown, is a British biologist, academic and life peer, who studies the relationship between long-term ecosystem dynamics and environmental change. She is Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, and an adjunct professor in biology at the University of Bergen. In 2018 she was elected Principal of St Edmund Hall, and took up the position from 1 October. She held the Tasso Leventis Chair of Biodiversity at Oxford and was founding Director, now Associate Director, of the Biodiversity Institute Oxford. Willis was Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 2013 to 2018. Her nomination by the House of Lords Appointments Commission as a crossbench life peer was announced on 17 May 2022.
Suzanne Lawless Duigan was an Australian paleobotanist who specialised in fossil pollen (palynology). She collaborated with fellow botanist Isabel Cookson extensively on Paleogene brown coal deposits in Victoria. She pioneered studies in south east Australian coal measures as she considered micro- and macrofossils of the region in terms of their relationships to living plant species and families and their ecologies.
Gerhard Lang was a German botanist with a research focus on vegetation ecology, geobotany, and vegetation history of the Quaternary.
Herbert Edgar Wright Jr. was an American Quaternary scientist. He contributed to the 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. His 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 worldwide.
(Iain) Colin Prentice holds the AXA chair in biosphere and climate impacts at Imperial College London and an honorary chair in ecology and evolution at Macquarie University in Australia.
Johanna Alida Coetzee was a researcher in the field of Palynology at the University of the Free State and a pioneer in the analysis of fossil pollen. Her DSc thesis received worldwide recognition and praise from the eminent glacial geologist Richard Foster Flint and helped recognise the significance of temperature changes in controlling shifts in global and local vegetation zones.
Verona Margaret Conway was a British plant ecologist and Unitarian minister. She undertook international recognised research on the palaeoecology of the Pennines and the ecology of Cladium mariscus.
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.
