pSESYNTH
Community mobilization for a multidisciplinary paleo-database of the Global South
Funded by International Union for Quaternary Research, the multi-year project “The whole is not the sum of the parts: building a synthesis database of past human-environmental systems in the Global South (pSESYNTH)” promotes international coordinated efforts to enhance paleo-scientific research, collaboration and application in the Global South.
The overarching goal of pSESYNTH is to establish, articulate and strengthen regional, interdisciplinary teams for studying past socio-environmental systems of the Global South through building the first multi-disciplinary paleo-database representing its regions.
Are you interested in joining pSESYNTH? Fill in this form and we will get in contact with you.
pSESYNTH activities are being developed around three main objectives (Fig. 1):
To explore what processes allow us to infer past drivers of environmental change using an interdisciplinary multiproxy approach, organized into three themes: paleoecology (e.g., pollen, charcoal, diatoms), paleoclimatology (e.g., biomarkers, stable isotopes, varves, numerical simulations), and archaeology (e.g., radiocarbon dates, phytoliths, archaeobotanical remains, material culture).
To quantitatively analyze the links among paleoecology, paleoclimatology and archaeology, with an emphasis on research questions that can be generic across the Global South (e.g., are there connections – or commonalities – between colonial legacies and the evolution of socio-environmental systems in the Global South?) or specific to each sub-region (e.g., at what spatial and temporal scales were human-environmental systems coupled or uncoupled to climatic fluctuations?).
To share the outputs and products of the project in the form of a database that meets the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016). pSESYNTH participants will capitalize on existing single- and multi-themed databases (e.g., Neotoma, NOAA, PANGAEA, LinkedEarth, CARD, ArchaeoGlobe, HYDE 3.2), in complementing their contributions in the novel Global South database. Together, the FAIR-ICON principles will underpin the database organization and will ensure geographic coverage, comparability, and accessibility for time-series data synthesis, which is crucial for mainstreaming paleoscience research from the Global South.
People
| Who | Role | Interests |
|---|---|---|
| Xavier Benito | Co-PI | Aquatic (paleo)ecologist interested in seeking when, where and by how much ecological communities change as response to natural and human-altered environmental regimes |
| Charuta Kulkarni | Co-PI | Interdisciplinary earth scientist exploring the formations and transformations of social-ecological systems, that are windows into empirically-informed inclusive solutions for their sustainable management |
| Manuel Chevalier | Co-PI | Palaeoclimatologist focused on developing and applying statistical techniques based on the estimation and propagation of proxy natural uncertainties to reconstruct climate from extensive networks of fossil pollen data |
Contact
We are seeking researchers working in or from the Global South, with broad interests in question-driven synthesis at the intersection of the three target project’s themes: paleoclimatology, paleoecology, and archaeology. Email us and/or complete the registration form to join the project.
Outputs
- Kulkarni et al. (2023) pSESYNTH project: Community mobilization for a multi-disciplinary paleo database of the Global South. Pages Magazine 31: 30-31 Download paper here
- Charuta Kulkarni, Xavier Benito, Ignacio A. Jara, Manuel Chevalier and pSESYNTH participants. pSESYNTH project: building a interdisciplinary paleo-database of the Global South. Poster presented at INQUA 2023, Rome (16-20 July 2023). Download file here