Big data palaeoecology and palaeogenomics
Contact person: Sanne Boessenkool
Keywords: Fossils, Ecology, Phenomics, Palaeogenomics, Statistics
Research group: Sanne Bossenkool (IBV), Andy Foote (IBV), Lee Hsiang Liow (NHM/PHAB), Kjetil Voje (NHM)
Department of Biosciences, Department of Geology (PHAB), Natural History Museum
Palaeoecological data presents direct windows into past ecosystems and climate, providing unparalleled temporal resolution of the chronology and tempo of ecological and evolutionary change. As a result, palaeoecological data can provide crucial insights into the resilience and adaptability of biodiversity. Big data is now revolutionising the field, with paleoecological and ancient genomic data growing at an unprecedented rate due in part to the development of new technologies in image (deep-learning) and genomic data acquisition. Increasingly, the reconstruction and analysis of ancient populations and communities using these growing data rely on sophisticated statistical tools and models. Features of such ancient data that confer statistical and analytical challenges include age-uncertainty, spatial and temporal averaging, incomplete reference databases, unequally spaced temporal samples and incomplete data matrices. Research proposals should ask questions about past diversity using interdisciplinary tools and/or data.
Research topics:
- Inferring ecological properties of populations and communities using historical/fossil data
- Integrating phylogenetic comparative approaches with fossil data
- Rapid phenotyping
- Bioinformatic pipelines for complex ancient environmental genomic datasets
- Temporal population genomics
Application domains:
- Palaeontology
- Palaeoecology
- Ecology and evolution
- Palaeogenomics
- Bioinformatics
- Statistics
