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Dr Jennifer Clear

HEAD OF DEPT GEOGRAPHY AN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
Geography and Environmental Science
0151 291 3885
clearj@hope.ac.uk

I graduated from the University of Liverpool, UK with a BSc in Physical Geography, MSc in Environment and Climate Change and PhD entitled ‘Holocene fire and vegetation dynamics in the northern European forests’. After I have held postdoc research positions in the Department of Forest Ecology, Czech University of Life Sciences, Prague, CZ and in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, NJ, USA. 

My research focuses on long-term environmental change, in particular, understanding anthropogenic activity and climate variability as drivers of these past changes. Essentially, I used applied palaeoecology (e.g. pollen) and stratigraphy (e.g. charcoal and geochemistry) to quantify past disturbance events (e.g. storms, fires, pathogens) from terrestrial, lacustrine and marine environments. I combine these long-term geological (sedimentary) records with short-term (e.g. instrumental and dendroecological records) to model present and future scenarios in environmental change to inform conservation and management policy. This interdisciplinary approach is essential to develop an informed approach in understanding future environmental change which led me to develop the PAGES working group Forest Dynamics (http://www.pages-igbp.org/ini/wg/forest-dynamics/intro).