Qualifications
- BA (University of Cambridge)
- PhD (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.
Undergraduate
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.
Journal Article
Relative pollen productivity estimates for alpine meadow vegetation, northeastern Tibetan Plateau
Qin, F., Jane Bunting, M., Zhao, Y., Li, Q., Cui, Q., & Ren, W. (in press). Relative pollen productivity estimates for alpine meadow vegetation, northeastern Tibetan Plateau. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-019-00751-4
Constraining pollen-based estimates of forest cover in the Amazon: A simulation approach
Whitney, B. S., Smallman, T. L., Mitchard, E. T., Carson, J. F., Mayle, F. E., & Bunting, M. J. (2019). Constraining pollen-based estimates of forest cover in the Amazon: A simulation approach. Holocene, 29(2), 262-270. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683618810394
A method for reconstructing temporal changes in vegetation functional trait composition using Holocene pollen assemblages
Carvalho, F., Brown, K. A., Waller, M. P., Bunting, M. J., Boom, A., & Leng, M. J. (2019). A method for reconstructing temporal changes in vegetation functional trait composition using Holocene pollen assemblages. PloS one, 14(5), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0216698
Opening the woods: towards a quantification of Neolithic clearance around the Somerset Levels and Moors
Farrell, M., Bunting, M. J., Sturt, F., Grant, M., Aalbersberg, G., Batchelor, R., …Whittle, A. (in press). Opening the woods: towards a quantification of Neolithic clearance around the Somerset Levels and Moors. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-019-09427-9
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
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.
Recent PhD supervisions
- Hywel Lewis (2015 - ) (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)