A new research paper from my colleagues has been published in Quaternary International! You can find the article here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618216305134
It deals with an exciting topic: vertical mobility in the Central Alps
Our last manuscript is now accessible online: http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/08/05/0959683616658523.abstract?rss=1
This paper deals especially with human activities during the Bronze Age in the Lower Engadine Valley (Central Alps), discussing the use of fire and the production of cereals.
Go get it!
This week I’ve been coring two 12-meter long sediment cores from the Mondsee, a lake in a middle of a stunning landscape (see picture) near Salzburg (Austria). Colleagues from Bern (Switzerland) brought all the equipment and savoir-faire, and did most of the job. Thank you so much Sandra, willy and Armin! I was on the platform to help them, as well as Christophe and Gerry (thanks to you too). It was a great and funny adventure, coring a lake was a première for me, I learnt a lot. Next chapter will be the results of the pollen analyses from these sediments…
Here is also a nice paper about the project.
New paper published in The Holocene: http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/08/05/0959683616658523.abstract?rss=1
Continue reading →I have been deeply honoured to receive the ProMontes Award of the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Studies, during the Phil.Alp Workshop organised in Lucerne, April 28 and 29th 2016, by the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences and the Interacademic Commission for Alpine Studies.
Continue reading →This month I’ve attended the seminar organised by the Laboratory of Maths of Besançon about Scientific informatics. There was nothing about directly related to my research topics but I was curious and thought I would eventually get interesting pieces of information. I did. The talks about rights and ownership of data and databases provided me useful insights regarding a personal project of mine (I hope I can write more about this very soon). There were a couple of talks about Python as well. Python is a language I want to get familiar with since long (more information here), and these talks motivated me. The syntax is similar to R, actually. I’m currently writing a little converter, slowly learning. I’ll probably use it with Alfred for punctual needs, but I’ll do larger scale conversions with R, and I’ll share it as it’s ready 😉
During a trivial conversation with colleagues, we came to imagine what a counting session could sound like if PolyCounter would play a different music tone every time a key is pressed (i.e. a pollen is counted). With a counting history, and with Processing, I was able to produce such a pollen symphony.
I recently found a pollen of Persicaria maculosa-type. I didn’t know about this type before, and as the grain was not well preserved and folded, at first I thought about Armeria. But I wasn’t convinced about that, specially given the details provided by the Flora Helvetica, which didn’t fit with the study site at all, even long time ago. Hopefully, thanks to colleagues, we came to identify it as the old Polygonum persicaria-type. Looking in tela botanica, I found that Polygonum persicaria is now known as Persicaria maculosa, and is common at my study site. And finally, I found the Persicaria maculosa-type in Beug (2004)!
Reference Beug, H.-J. (2004). Leitfaden der Pollenbestimmung für Mitteleuropa und angrenzende Gebiete. München: Pfeil.
