What do Easter Island, the Pyrenees and the Caribbean have in common?
This year, the Botanical Institute of Barcelona (IBB) researcher Valentí Rull (VR) has published a book on the prehistory of Easter Island, coedited with Christopher Stevenson, from the Virginia Commonwealth University (USA). The book has been issued by Springer Nature and is a collection of selected papers on the settlement, cultural development, deforestation and sociecological collapse of this emblematic Pacific island.
Now VR is writing two more books that have already been approved by Springer and are planned for July and December 2023.
One of these books (July) is coauthored with Teresa Vegas, from the University of Barcelona, and deals with the history of Pyrenean vegetation during the last 3000 years (since the Bronze Age). The book is based on the pollen analysis of the Lake Montcortès varved sedimentary sequence, a reference section discovered by VR in 2004 that encompasses the longest continuous high-resolution Mediterranean record of vegetation dynamics for the last millennia.
Finally, VR is the sole author of the second 2023 book (December), which is on the origin and evolution of Caribbean mangroves. This book is also based on palynological work developed by the author in the 1990s and includes the Eocene origin of these plant communities, their Oligocene revolution and further Neogene diversification, and the response of mangrove ecosystems to Pleistocene glaciations and Holocene human impact.
These three books are a sample of the variety of environments (coastal, montane, insular, continental), biomes (tropical, subtropical, temperate), time intervals (historical, prehistoric, millennial, deep-time), cultures (Polynesian, European, Amerindian), subjects (vegetation, climate, eustasy, tectonism, anthropization) and disciplines (ecology, evolution, biogeography) studied by VR along his scientific career (1980-present).
References:
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Rull, V. & Stevenson, C. M. 2022. The Prehistory of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Towards an Interdisciplinary Integrative Framework. Springer Nature, Cham.
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Rull, V. 2022. The Caribbean mangroves: An Eocene innovation with no Cretaceous precursors. Earth-Science Reviews, 231: 104070.
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Rull, V., Vegas-Vilarrúbia, T., Corella, J.P., Trapote, M.C., Montoya, E., Valero-Garcés, B. 2021. A unique Pyrenean varved record provides a detailed reconstruction of Mediterranean vegetation and land-use dynamics over the last three millennia. Quaternary Science Reviews, 268: 107128.
