I am interested in how climates and environments have changed through geological time. Focussing on the last 65 million years I use fossilised remains of plants, fungi and plankton to reconstruct the environments these organisms would have inhabited and the ambient climate during their lifetimes. Creating large datasets of fossil information I produce global maps of vegetation, climate, soil and lake distributions that have been incorporated into climate model studies.
My current research is looking at the Eocene – Oligocene Transition, when Antarctic ice sheets first grew, and the Miocene epoch with its warmer than modern global climate. My current field sites are Cyprus and Derbyshire, UK.