The Paper Trail
"The Paper Trail" is a series of interviews with researchers who published in the Netherlands Journal of Geosciences. We ask them to tell us a bit about the background to their work, the relevance to science and society and just how it was to write the piece!
The Paper Trail
How biogenic silica can help reconstruct landscape changes in the Netherlands
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Henk Kombrink
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Season 1
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Episode 10
Until recently, little work was done using biogenic silica or phytoliths for palaeoecological reconstructions in the Netherlands. This is because most studies rely on pollen or macrofossil remains. However, phytoliths are potentially quite powerful because they do not suffer from the same level of organic degradation as pollen or macrofossil do. For that reason, Iris de Wolf sampled a variety of vegetation types in the Netherlands in order to see if the phytolith assemblages found are markedly different from each other. That happens to be the case, as Iris explains in this podcast.