Dylan S. Davis

I am working with Dr. Billy D'Andrea at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory to document past climate variability on Madagascar and to evaluate its relationship to small-scale foraging and agropastoral communities. Specifically, we are using sediment cores from lakes, ponds, and archaeological sites across SW Madagascar to develop a comprehensive molecular biomarker history comprising fecal biomarkers, leaf wax distributions, and leaf wax carbon and hydrogen isotopes. These data help us to reconstruct past environmental and climatic conditions. By compiling many different cores from across the study region, we are planning to use geospatial methods to create spatially referenced reconstructions of these data across space and time (like a weather map of the past). We will be able to use these new datasets to trace the introduction of different animals into the region and shifts in vegetation and human land-use strategies over time. Ultimately, this project will help us to answer the following research questions: 1. How have human livelihood strategies responded to local and regional incidence of drought over the past 1000 years? 2. What are the cumulative impacts of human land-use strategies on biodiversity and overall ecological productivity? These issues are particularly important at this moment in time, when traditional land-use practices of Malagasy communities are under threat by industrial development and strict government regulations on population mobility.