Our Organizing Committee are delighted to bring INQUA to Dublin and we would like to warmly welcome you to the 20th INQUA Congress to be held between 25th and 31st July 2019.

We all have a deep commitment to the Congress and we all want our delegates to thoroughly enjoy the stimulation of multiple scientific sessions in the purpose built Convention centre. In addition we hope you are all looking forward to the warm welcome from Dublin and the Irish people and that you enjoy the magnificent Irish scenery on the various field trips we have organised.

We are sincerely looking forward to July 2019 and to welcoming you to the INQUA Congress.

Prof. Pete Coxon MRIA FTCD

Glaciers, moraines and climate: Challenges of identifying, dating and extracting palaeoclimatic data from former glacier fluctuations

Inchnadamph, Scotland

Register online using link above by: 13th May 2018

Moraines, as the primary glacial landform, represent the most direct evidence of former glaciation: the mapping of these and other landforms allows three-dimensional glacier reconstruction and empirically-based calculations of palaeo-precipitation. Sediments in moraines allow the reconstruction of glacier dynamics and the palaeo-environment. If suitable material is available, typically in the form of stable boulders on moraine crestlines or buried organic material, radiometric dating techniques such as cosmogenic isotope dating can be applied to determine the depositional age of these boulders and, by proxy, the moraine itself. In other settings, the terrestrial evidence of glacier fluctuations provided by moraines can be linked to continuous distal archives provided, for example, by lacustrine sediment records.

Despite many recent advances in all the aforementioned fields, these have remained rather isolated, with little cross-fertilisation of ideas between the different relevant fields (e.g. geomorphology, sedimentology, limnology and geochronology). A greater understanding of up-to-date techniques, required standards and associated uncertainties across these fields will encourage more cross-disciplinary collaboration and development of robust multi-proxy research projects. Furthermore, some crucial issues, such as the correct identification of former glacier dynamics (e.g. surging vs non-surging) from moraines, remain in their infancy after decades of highly specialised research. These restrictions severely restrict our ability to robustly derive paleoclimate information from archives of past glacier change.

This training school aims to change this by training young geoscientists from the perspective of still-disparate, highly-specialised fields (geomorphology, sedimentology, palaeolimnology, palaeoclimatology, geochronology) to embrace a novel inter-disciplinary approach.

The Lime Tree An Ealdhain, Fort William, Scotland (conference venue, days 1 and 2); Arisaig & Kentra (field excursions, days 3 and 4)

The Sea-Level and Coastal Change (SLaCC) Research Group of the QRA was set up in 2015 to bring together scientists from the UK and northwest Europe who are researching different aspects of sea level and coastal changes. This 2018 meeting is a co-sponsored venture following on from this and will combine two days of conference in Fort William (day 1 – registration and ice breaker, day 2 – full day of talks and posters) and two days of fieldwork in the Arisaig and Kentra areas of northwest Scotland. The field excursions will be used to investigate isolation basins, raised coastal deposits, present day shorelines and coastal environments. We also hope to include field sites that demonstrate coastal evolution and present day coastal change and management as well as Holocene sea-level sites. We expect to have 25-30 delegates attend the meeting, ranging from postgraduate students to professors from UK HEIs, coastal managers from the Environment Agency/SEPA and delegates from allied professions including coastal archaeologists.

Diverse knowledge systems for fire policy and biodiversity conservation: integrating palaeoecology, traditional knowledge and stakeholders.

Contact: Daniele Colombaroli, daniele.colombaroli@rhul.ac.uk 
 

One of the key challenges identified by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is the conservation of ecosystems under future climatic, anthropogenic and disturbance regime changes. The objective of this workshop is to foster collaboration between Quaternary Science and more applied disciplines (Biodiversity Conservation, Forest Management, Climate impacts), by bringing together palaeoecologists, human geographers, modern ecologists and stakeholders, to discuss:

1) How long-term data on fire-vegetation interaction can inform fire management (prescribed burning, fuel reduction, salvage logging) to maintain/restore biodiversity (paleoecology-informed conservation). This will imply discussing approaches for palaeodiversity reconstruction that can contribute towards stakeholders’ goals for conservation.

2) How local, traditional, Indigenous knowledge systems on fire management maintain and promote biodiversity (community-owned driven conservation). This will involve identifying sustainable fire-related land use practices successfully implemented by local communities without major influence from external stakeholders, and their responses to future global changes.

3) Defining conservation challenges and agendas from stakeholders and policy-makers that can be addressed by long-term records and local/traditional/Indigenous knowledge in co-production processes (stakeholder-driven research). This will include identifying conservation priorities for key species and ecosystems, and integrating ongoing efforts of collaboration between stakeholders, local communities and the paleoecology community.

This integrated approach will improve our scientific understanding of “contested landscapes” and their conservation in a changing world, as well as how conservation targets (natural or cultural) best meet landscape management goals. The connection between Quaternary Science and stakeholders will be particularly insightful and productive for 1) the detection of conservation measures to balance specific targets in areas that offers conservation challenges on both natural structure and cultural properties; 2) the feasibility of alternative management objectives where restoring naturalness, and protecting cultural heritage, are in conflict (Whitlock et al., 2018).

Testate amoebae are a diverse group of protozoans that inhabit aquatic and moist terrestrial environments, from lakes and peatlands to soils, litter and moss habitats. Their shells preserve well in sediments, a characteristic which has led to their wide application as palaeoenvironmental indicators. They have been used extensively, for example, in the reconstruction of Holocene hydrological change in peatlands and trophic status change in lakes. They are also increasingly being used in biomonitoring studies, particularly in lakes impacted by heavy metals and other contaminants.

The ISTA-9 meeting will be the 9th meeting of the International Society of Testate Amoebae Researchers, an expanding community of researchers that includes palaeoecologists, micropalaeontologists, taxonomists and molecular biologists from academic and other (e.g. professional) backgrounds. The QRA is sponsoring a full day session at the meeting on 'Palaeoecology and Climatology' which will run on 12 September 2018.