IEHN Meetings

16 September, 2011, Trinity College, Dublin

The Sixteenth Meeting of the Irish Environmental History Network featured a talk by Dr. Jane Bunting of the University of Hull. The talk was entitled "Evidence for Coppicing in the Pollen Record", and a short abstract may be found below.

Worked wood attests to human use of coppicing and other woodland management methods since the Mesolithic, but there is no agreement on how woodland management (as opposed to woodland clearance) might show up in the pollen record. This talk reports the findings of a recent project which aimed to clarify how coppicing alters the pollen signal of a woodland area, by combining study of flowering and pollen production in coppiced woodlands with pollen traps, short-core studies of the vegetation history over the last few decades and simulation experiments using models of pollen dispersal and deposition to explore pollen signals in situations with no modern equivalent, such as a completely wooded landscape.

The meeting took place from 5pm, Friday 16 September, 2011, in the Neill/Hoey lecture theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin. The meeting was chaired by Dr. Bettina Stefanini of Trinity College Dublin and the IPEAN.