The newly appointed office bearers for the 2023-27 Inter-Congress period of the Humans and Biosphere Commission (HABCOM) have officially assumed their roles at INQUA Roma-2023. To ensure a seamless transition, hybrid online and offline interactions and meetings were organized between the incoming and outgoing board members. The new team conducted monthly meetings to develop and refine our plans for the inter-congress period. Additionally, we successfully promoted the INQUA grant call for 2024 to attract diverse proposals from around the world for funding consideration.
HABCOM is thrilled to announce the recipients of the winning proposals that focus on emerging areas of human biosphere research while maintaining geographical diversity. The awarded projects are as follows:
- Mapping Ancient Africa: Climate, vegetation and humans – Phase II (MAACH 2.0)
- Recipient: Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr
- Affiliation: Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
- Summary: The Mapping Ancient Africa (MAA) project embarked on a mission in 2021 to unite experts in palaeoclimate, climate modeling, palynology, and archaeology to decode climate patterns across Africa spanning the last 4 million years. This endeavour sought to address the significant uncertainties surrounding the nexus between climate change and the evolution, cultural development, and dispersion of hominins in Africa. At its inception, MAA initiated network-building efforts, including regional hubs and a bimonthly online seminar series of 16 talks. These aimed to bridge gaps created by limited research funds, travel restrictions, and high conference costs, and resulted in greater participation of underrepresented researchers, especially from African nations, became more accessible. MAACH 2.0 will build on this progress, through greater networking and a series of publications.
- Palaeolithic Hominins and Habitats: Out of Africa to South Asia (PalaeoHome)
- Recipient: Kumar Akhilesh
- Affiliation: Sharma Centre for Heritage, Chennai, India
- Summary: PalaeoHome is an exciting project drawing together a global network of scientists working in India, Africa, Arabia, and SW and E Asia to address major issues related to multiple questions on the ‘Out of Africa’ story as related to chronology, palaeoenvironments and behavioural variability over the Lower Palaeolithic (Early to Middle Pleistocene), exploring similarities as also differences in evolutionary trajectories. Through inclusive hybrid meetings (online and in-person: India, Ethiopia), we seek to network, share ideas, formulate publications, include and skill ECRs, build a database synergizing with INQUA groups with similar aims, and engage in public outreach with the wider community.
- Settlement Effect on Peat of Kalimantan (SEPOK)
- Recipient: Monika Ruwaimana
- Affiliation: Universitas Atma Jaya Ygyakarta, Indonesia
- Summary: SEPOK aims to better understand the impacts of urban development in peatlands. It will evaluate the scale and character of impacts of long-term urban settlement on peatlands by combining core depth, age and geochemistry measurement with remote sensing data. The team will compare peat data from heavily impacted and unimpacted areas, and based on this comparison, will infer the peat morphology and carbon storage of the pre-settlement landscape and evaluate the impact of urban development around the city of Pontianak, Indonesia.
The Quaternary community eagerly anticipates the development of these projects over the coming year.
In recent HABCOM-funded projects, the “Teeth as Tools” initiative, led by Carlo Meloro from the University of Liverpool, UK, has progressed through two workshops and is now in its final stages. Stay tuned for the project’s outcomes, which promise valuable insights into the relationship between human biology and cultural practices.
The “EPD Boost” project led by Walter Finsinger, Université de Montpellier, France, brought members from a diverse set of paleoecological communities together to foster combined analyses of continental datasets. The overall long-term goal of the project is to integrate the diverse set of European palaeoecological data into Neotoma and their joint analysis to better understand the whole ecosystem change on the European continent during the Quaternary.
The “pSESYNTH” project led by Xavi Benito, IRTA, Spain is focused on building a synthesis database of past human-environmental systems in the Global South. Several online meetings done by the team facilitated discussions on how varied datasets from different Global South regions can be effectively consolidated, while initially collating multivariate records mostly associated with aquatic and terrestrial environmental change. We await confirmation of their plan to organise an in-person workshop in early 2024.
The “LEM” project lead by Trina Bose from Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleosciences, India aims to map and model LULC indicators in different ecological regions of the monsoon to quantify modern analogues of climate variations. An associated aim is to integrate all published modern and palaeo biodiversity data into the South Asian Biodiversity Portal (SABDP) following the NEOTOMA palaeoecology database. LEM held its first International School and Symposium (LEM-ISS) in March 2023 in tropical dry deciduous forests of western Vidarbha, Maharashtra, India. Twenty-three trainee participants from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka interacted with experts from India, Sri Lanka, France, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.
The “Mapping Ancient Africa” project led by William Gosling, Amsterdam University, Netherlands, is a joint project with PALCOM, and will be supported going forward by MAACH 2.0 in the coming year. The project team was active at the INQUA Congress in Rome and via series of workshops and online seminars.
The HABCOM team is actively strategizing a series of initiatives for 2024 to expand the community of human biosphere researchers under the HABCOM umbrella and foster stronger connections between the scientific community and society. These initiatives include a podcast series to be broadcast through the website, social media, and through personal emails with all members. Plans are underway to conduct a series of seminars in collaboration with other Commissions, promoting diverse perspectives in human biosphere research.
To streamline outreach activities, the team is currently working on organizing an open meeting for all HABCOM members in late January 2024. Recognizing time zone constraints, the meeting is scheduled to run twice, tentatively on January 25th for Asia/Pacific and January 26th for Africa/Europe/US time zones. Further details will be communicated to all HABCOM members via email.
We eagerly anticipate the participation of more young researchers from diverse geographic locations in HABCOM. If you are interested in joining, please visit our website at https://inqua.org/commissions/habcom/join and follow us in social media @habcom_inqua. Your involvement will contribute to the dynamic and inclusive community we are building within the Humans and Biosphere Commission.
