Marine Palynology

Land-Sea correlations

The complementary analysis of marine sedimentary pollen/spores and dinoflagellate cyst assemblages give information about both terrestrial and marine (past) environmental conditions. This provides us with a unique opportunity to establish land-sea correlations.

Selective degradation

We investigate how the stable degradation ranking of dinocysts can be used to disentangle paleo-productivity and organic matter preservation signals in modern and ancient sediments. In-situ exposure experiments, and incubations are used to estimate the short-medium term degradation effect under varying redox conditions.

Oxygen proxy development

We develop a method to reconstruct and quantify past bottom water oxygen concentrations by investigating the species specific aerobic degradation of organic walled dinoflagellate cysts and the Neodymium isotopic composition of foraminifera shells.

Paleoecology of dinoflagellate cysts

We investigate which factors steer production, morphology and geographic distribution of dinoflagellate cysts as well as the diversity of their assemblages in marine sediments.

Pollen as indicators for environmental change in southern Italy

This project tries to reconstruct the vegetation of the last 5.000 years along the Adriatic Sea Coast by analyzing the pollen grains present in marine and river sediments. The project itself aims to clarify how the Human activities, particularly agriculture, have changed the landscape and the surrounding areas in order to promote the growing of edible plants with high growth rates.