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Archives 2006 - 2007>
‘The Plants of the Queen Charlotte Islands - Past, Present and Future’
16 Nov 2006
Dr. Rolf Mathewes is Professor of Biology and Associate Dean of Science at Simon Fraser University. He began post secondary education in 1965 as a Charter Student at SFU, graduating B.Sc. (Biology) in 1969, and Ph.D. (Botany) from UBC in 1973. He is an internationally recognized authority in the fields of paleoecology, paleobotany, and paleoclimatology – the “paleo” indicating his interests in the study of ancient things. While he works mostly in the area of palynology (study of ancient pollens and spores, the most abundant of all fossils), his knowledge and expertise also find numerous applications in the very modern field of forensic botany.
Most of Rolf’s scientific work has concentrated on western Canada, with particular emphasis on the vegetation and climatic history of coastal British Columbia. It is truly fascinating to reflect upon the perceptiveness of the trained eye of the expert botanist, and the conclusions divined from data on plant macrofossils, fossil insects, ancient pollens and spores, even sedimentary charcoal – the residual evidence of things that lived in the very distant past.
A bee was encapsulated in a resin 50 million years ago, a log was found near a high mountain creek where there is now no forest, the bottom of Hecate Straight holds remains of freshwater life forms, a squirrel’s nest in northern Alaska where no squirrel lives today, provide a treasure trove of biological information. Pollens tell of very different vegetations in former times - the story that Rolf unfolds reveals evidence of global climatic changes and the past disturbance history of ecosystems, due to droughts, fires, earthquakes, even tsunamis, and human activities.
The Queen Charlotte Islands – the “Canadian Galapagos” – are of special interest to Dr. Mathewes. The region apparently escaped the most recent glaciation of 24,000 years ago that encrusted the rest of North America, allowing the Islands to develop their own unique ecological systems in isolation from the rest of the continent. Rolf’s talk: "The Plants of the Queen Charlotte Islands - Past, Present and Future", will give us a glimpse into the past, and possibly a portent of what the future may hold
Rolf Mathewes
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