Natasha BarboliniResearcher

About me

I am a palaeoecologist who uses the fossil pollen record to investigate past global change. My two key aims are: 1) improving our understanding of biodiversity responses to environmental change, and 2) identifying suitable analogues for Earth’s climatic future, to improve model capabilities of ecosystem dynamics.

To achieve this, I study past extinctions and recovery during intervals of heightened climate or environmental change, such as global cooling 34 million years ago at the Eocene-Oligocene Transition, the end-Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago, and the warm Eemian, ending 116,000 years ago. Fossil pollen records from these intervals hold a wealth of data on how species and communities evolve in response to sudden shifts in temperature, pCO₂, or UV radiation, but can also serve as climate proxies if calibrated by other datasets.

Through a better understanding of these long-term ecological and evolutionary processes and their links with climate change, palaeo-datasets can be harnessed to improve predictions for our planet's future. With the Earth’s climate state rapidly moving to pCO₂ levels last seen in the Miocene or even the Eocene epochs, deep-time records are a vital part of the puzzle in quantifying the rate and magnitude of biosphere change on Earth today.