Esther
Githumbi
Post-doctoral Researcher
TU Dresden
I am a (palaeo)ecological researcher focusing on landscape changes during the Holocene. My expertise is the use of multiple proxies such as pollen, charcoal, sediment physical and chemical characteristics to develop records of vegetation change, fire history and sediment processes. I have also worked with land-cover reconstruction (REVEALS) models and spatial interpolation models to develop land-cover change maps. Through a multidisciplinary approach, I collaborate with archaeologists, historians and climate modellers to develop an understanding of human-environmental interactions the Holocene (11700 K BP to present) in different landscapes. I participated in the development of European land-cover reconstructions covering the last 11700 cal BP to provide reliable estimates of land-cover change that can be used for climate modelling.
2018 – 2021 Land and Climate Interactions in Europe (LandClimII)
At Linnaeus University and Lund University in Sweden, I was involved in the development of quantitative land-cover reconstructions using the ‘Regional Estimates of VEgetation Abundance from Large Sites’ (REVEALS) model for Europe. We produced the first quantitative pollen based land-cover covering the Holocene (last 11,700 cal yr BP) using >1100 pollen records from across Europe and part of the Eastern Mediterranean-Black Sea-Caspian-Corridor. We have reconstructed the cover of 31 plant taxa assigned to 12 plant functional types (PFTs) and three land-cover types (LCTs). We also presented a new synthesis of relative pollen productivities (RPPs) for 45 European plant taxa was performed for this reconstruction. The data from this project is available in Pangaea (LandClimII 2021).
2013 – 2017 Resilience in East African landscape
My doctoral research focussed on East African landscape responses to climate change and human impacts so as to better understand how they may respond to future climate change and human impacts. A multi-proxy approach analysing pollen, macro-charcoal, sediment characterisation and elemental profiles was used to develop new palaeoecological records and reveal environmental changes since the late Pleistocene-Holocene transition period from Mau Forest and since the mid-Holocene from Amboseli. (Holocene Environmental and human interactions in East Africa.”