Dr Jane Bunting

Dr Jane Bunting

Reader in Geography

Faculty and Department

  • Faculty of Science and Engineering
  • School of Environmental Sciences

Qualifications

  • BA (University of Cambridge)
  • PhD / DPhil (University of Cambridge)
  • PGCert (University of Hull)

Summary

Jane Bunting is a long term ecologist with research interests focused on better understanding of the long term ecological dynamics of cultural landscapes, mostly from pollen records.

She went to university intending to be a physicist and got distracted along the way - after earning a degree (final year in Botany) and PhD at Cambridge, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher in Waterloo, Ontario, and at the University of Stirling before joining the University of Hull, initially as a lecturer, in 1997.

She currently works mainly on modelling pollen dispersal and deposition as a tool for reconstructing past land cover and is part of various international working groups, including PolLandCal, Landclim and PAGES Landcover6k. She also coordinates the Virtual Palaeosciences project, which seeks to increase inclusion and equity through developing virtual and digital teaching resources for use alongside more traditional field and practical work in the field.

My teaching falls mostly into these three topic areas:

conservation, ecology and biogeography

environmental change science

research methods and study skills ("how to be a geographer/environmental scientist/geologist")

As soon as I learn new things, I _need_ to tell other people about them - teaching and research are both central to my career and practice. I think of what I do as supporting students along the way to being independent lifelong learners, and I am currently particularly interested in helping students (especially those who are the first in their families to attend university) to understand what is expected of them at university and in making sure that all my classes include support for development of life-long learning skills such as reflective practice and writing skills.

Recent outputs

View more outputs

Book Chapter

Pollen productivity estimates from KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg, South Africa

Hill, T. R., Duthie, T. J., & Bunting, J. (2021). Pollen productivity estimates from KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg, South Africa. In J. Runge, W. D. Gosling, A. Lézine, & L. Scott (Eds.), Quaternary Vegetation Dynamics – The African Pollen Database (259-274). London: CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003162766-16

Journal Article

Trait-based approaches as ecological time machines: Developing tools for reconstructing long-term variation in ecosystems

Brown, K. A., Bunting, M. J., Carvalho, F., de Bello, F., Mander, L., Marcisz, K., …Svenning, J. C. (2023). Trait-based approaches as ecological time machines: Developing tools for reconstructing long-term variation in ecosystems. Functional ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.14415

Landscapes for Neolithic people in Mainland, Orkney

Bunting, M. J., Farrell, M., Dunbar, E., Reimer, P., Bayliss, A., Marshall, P., & Whittle, A. (2022). Landscapes for Neolithic people in Mainland, Orkney. Journal of world prehistory, 35(1), 87-107. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-022-09166-y

Land management explains major trends in forest structure and composition over the last millennium in California's Klamath Mountains

Knight, C. A., Anderson, L., Bunting, M. J., Champagne, M., Clayburn, R. M., Crawford, J. N., …Battles, J. J. (2022). Land management explains major trends in forest structure and composition over the last millennium in California's Klamath Mountains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(12), Article e2116264119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2116264119

Do Local Habitat Conditions Affect Estimates of Relative Pollen Productivity and Source Area in Heathlands?

Bunting, M. J., & Farrell, M. (in press). Do Local Habitat Conditions Affect Estimates of Relative Pollen Productivity and Source Area in Heathlands?. Frontiers in ecology and evolution, 10, Article 787345. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2022.787345

Research interests

palaeoecology

long term ecology

ecology and climate change

cultural landscapes

environment

environmental archaeology

landscape ecology

Quaternary science

environmental change

pollen analysis

plant community ecology

woodlands

wetlands

mires

Lead investigator

Project

Funder

Grant

Started

Status

Project

Virtual Palaeoscience (ViPs) Project: Collating, curating and developing virtual lab and fieldtrip resources for palaeoenvironmental teaching

Funder

Quaternary Research Association

Grant

£1,500.00

Started

1 May 2021

Status

Ongoing

Project

Time of their lives

Funder

English Heritage

Grant

£25,000.00

Started

1 November 2013

Status

Complete

Project

Digital resources for practical learning in the GEES disciplines

Funder

EC European Commission

Grant

£54,757.00

Started

1 June 2021

Status

Complete

Co-investigator

Project

Funder

Grant

Started

Status

Project

Development of the first global standard for airborne microplastic monitoring

Funder

NERC Natural Environment Research Council

Grant

£71,120.00

Started

1 November 2022

Status

Complete

Project

GCRF- PPF 20 Forecasting Ebola Spillovers

Funder

00 University of Hull

Grant

£18,157.00

Started

1 February 2018

Status

Complete

Postgraduate supervision

Jane welcomes applications on any topic related to the use of pollen data and allied methods to reconstruct past environments - including developing methods, proof of concept, and application to archaeological, ecological or applied (e.g. conservation) problems. These projects can be centered on working with sediment cores, on modern pollen-vegetation relationships, or on working largely with secondary data and computer models. The HUMPOL and LandPolFlow (the MSA reconstruction approach) software suites were developed in Hull.

Her own work is primarily in the northern hemisphere temperate and boreal zones, but she collaborates widely and is happy to consider projects in any part of the world.

Current and recent PhD supervisions

- Luke Michno-Neville (2021-present) (Centre for Water Cultures) - Living on the Edge: Surviving and thriving in the Holocene Humberhead Levels

- Thya van den Berg (2020-present) (THYME project) - Linking landscape processes and bioeconomies through translation of pollen archives

- Hywel Lewis (2015 - 2020) (University of Bradford) - Interactions between human industry and woodland ecology in the South Pennines: 1600 - present

- Yiman Fang (2015 - 2019) - Understanding the relationships between surface pollen and vegetation in southeast China: an aid to reconstruct past vegetation dynamics during Little Ice Age (Yiman is now a post-doctoral researcher at Zhejiang University, China)

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