Silence of the Clams: Reconstructing the history of the Colorado River using marine bivalves
Roopnarine: Good morning. As we get the slides set up here, for an introduction I'd like to go back to the passage from Rachel Carson that Kristen read. Rachel Carson is one of my favorite authors. That passage I think was particularly interesting because she mentions the word history in there. One of the reasons that I moved sort of away from being a strict marine ecologist/biologist into the field of paleontology is because I was interested in reconstructing history. That has lead me to the work that I'm going to present today, where we are essentially reconstructing recent histories of environments in an attempt to make a contribution to conservation biology.
One of the problems facing conservation of natural resources and natural areas is that so-called, even areas that we think of as very natural today, as Tom pointed out, have been influenced very heavily by human activity. One of the things that we're commonly missing is a picture of the environment as it was before any human activity and any human influence. To reconstruct this type of history, we go back into the fossil record and geological record where, until recently, our ability to measure and describe things in the same way that we do as biologists, has been somewhat limited. Today, I'll present a set of techniques that are very powerful and very new that we are using to reconstruct past marine environments with fairly good precision. And with that in mind, we hope to be able to make a contribution to conservation biology.
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