Quaternary Paleoenvironments and Global Change

The group investigates the environmental variability in continental areas during the Quaternary at different time scales from glacial cycles to annual and at different spatial scales including monitoring, from small basins to interhemispheric teleconnections. We use palaeoarchives as landscape and geomorphic systems, lakes, caves, biogenic deposits and archaeological sites. We follow a pluridisciplinary approach, enhancing the palaeoenvironmental inferences through the use of sedimentological, geochemical, and biological proxies, and monitoring of surface processes and atmospheric deposition. We work in the Iberian Peninsula, the Americas and Africa. We reconstruct time-series sensitive to past global changes to understand the natural variability of climate, vegetation and hydrology, and the impacts on the ecosystems and surface processes of both natural and anthropogenic factors, as well as the impact of climate variability in patterns of human occupation and land use throughout time