K.D. Nelson Lecture Series – Dr. Allison Karp

The Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences presents the K.D. Nelson Lecture Series featuring speaker Dr. Allison Karp. Her talk is titled: Molecular Answers to Burning Questions: Investigating Ancient Wildfire Dynamics. 

Fire is increasingly recognized as a critical process in the Earth System with complex interactions between both abiotic (e.g., atmosphere, climate) and biotic (e.g., vegetation, herbivores) factors. However, there are major gaps in our fundamental understanding of how fire feedbacks will respond to global change. To address this problem, we can test how fire responded to climate forcings in the past. Here, I demonstrate some recent advances in how we can interpret polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) as a proxy for paleofire using case studies from various periods of global change during the Cenozoic.

Dr. Karp is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. She is a molecular paleoecologist who uses fossil molecules preserved in sediments to examine fire dynamics in ancient ecosystems. Her research explores how fire has changed through geologic time, interactions between fire and herbivory, and the impact of fire on global carbon cycling.