Editorial: Mesoamerican paleoecology

PALEOECOLOGY PALEOECOLOGY PALEOECOLOGY Amazonian exploitation revisited: ecological asymmetry and the policy pendulum

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org T first scientists to enter Amazonia encountered a wonderland of undescribed organisms living in what appeared to be unoccupied and untouched forest. Adjectives they used to describe the forest included “virgin”, “pristine”, and “timeless”, a vision which became incorporated into scientific thinking. Explanations of high Amazonian d...

Paleoecology grand challenge

Exactly 50 years ago, in 1964, a landmark article whose two-word title, “Strong inference,” revealed little and evoked plenty, appeared in the hallowed pages of Science (Platt, 1964). Simply stated, Platt’s view of scientific research in its highest form proceeds through three steps: development of alternative hypotheses; design of crucial experiments to exclude one or more hypotheses; executio...

PALEOECOLOGY PALEOECOLOGY PALEOECOLOGY Forest fire and climate change in western North America: insights from sediment charcoal records

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org F fires have swept into public and policy awareness over the past several decades, with an increase in the frequency of large fires in western North America (Westerling et al. 2006). At the same time, human settlements and other infrastructure are impinging on the wildland interface at an unprecedented rate, resulting in annual US f...

Plant Paleoecology in Deep Time

The paleoecology of plants as a modern discipline, distinct from traditional floristics or biostratigraphy, has undergone an enormous expansion in the past 20 years. In addition to baseline studies characterizing extinct plants and plant assemblages in terms of their growth habits, environmental preferences, and patterns of association, paleoecology has converged on neoecology and represents a ...

Mesoamerican Civilization: Pattern and Process