An interesting find today. I’m just going to quote straight from the home page for PalEON: “PalEON (the Paleo-Ecological Observatory Network) is an interdisciplinary team of paleoecologists, ecological statisticians, and ecosystem modelers from across a number of institutions. Our goal is to reconstruct forest composition, fire regime, and climate in forests across the northeastern US and Alaska over the past 2000 years and then use this to drive and validate terrestrial ecosystem models. We will develop a coherent spatiotemporal inference framework to quantify trends and extreme events in paleoecological and paleoclimatic time series. Variables such as forest composition, fire regime, and moisture balance will be inferred from corresponding paleoecological proxies, with rigorous estimates of uncertainty.”

Check it out! What else can I say…

Our July book club discussion was Dunmire’s Gardens of New Spain. Out of print for a while, it is once again available from UT Press as a print on demand. Dunmire’s classic work describes how food plants traveled from Central America north and south and ulitmately, with Spanish contact, west to Europe.

For August AND September we will be discussing Spengler’s Fruit from the Sands: the Silk Road origins of the foods we eat. In the first half of the book, he describes the travel and trade throughout Eurasia over several millenia (all heavily referenced – that must be the academic in him) and then ventures on to assorted plants and how they traveled along the routes. Although as a paleoethnobotanist, aka archaeobotanist, Spengler’s style is more academic than, say, that of the author of the Food Explorer, the topic is quite interesting.

The plants in the first half of the book are the grains. Personally, I’m looking forward to the fruits and nuts but I think he’s operating on the principle of – you can’t have dessert if you don’t eat your dinner. Just a thought.

This morning I came across a 196-day time lapse of growing an acorn from seed. I think the most cool part of it all was learning that the youtube channel is for someone or something named boxlapse. Although there IS a boxlapse website. it simply sends you off to youtube, twitter, etc.

I didn’t watch all the videos, however I did watch the one for a mango tree. I’m rather partial to growing mangos from seed since my sister used to have a mango tree and would send me mangos. When I finally figured out how to grow the trees from seeds, she moved and I lost access to the seeds (oh, well, and the mango fruit as well). Of that last batch, I planted 6 seeds. Two years later only one has survived but it seems healthy. Fingers crossed!