I am a palaeoecologist and a palynologist. I read the pollen, spores and charcoal preserved in sediments and rock hyrax middens to reconstruct how southern African landscapes have changed over the last tens of thousands of years.

My research is concentrated on the southern margin of South Africa. This is a region of extraordinary contrasts: the Cape Floristic Region and the Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany centre are among the most botanically diverse places on Earth, and the same coastline holds some of the earliest evidence for our species’ evolution to behavioural modernity. Despite decades of intensive work on both the modern ecology and the archaeology, we still know comparatively little about the climatic and environmental changes that shaped either. That gap is what my work addresses.

Methodologically I am a fossil pollen specialist, but the questions usually need more than pollen. My projects combine palynology with dung fungal spores as a proxy for herbivory, micro- and macro-charcoal for fire, phytoliths and diatoms, geochemistry and stable isotopes, and radiocarbon and luminescence chronologies. A parallel strand of my work is calibration: understanding how modern vegetation actually translates into the pollen signal, which is what makes the fossil records interpretable in the first place.

I completed my BSc, BSc Honours, MSc and DPhil in Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town, with doctoral research on the late Quaternary palaeoenvironments of the southern Cape. After two postdoctoral fellowships on the German-funded RAiN projects, I joined the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience at Nelson Mandela University in 2018.

Seven formative years there produced a research programme, a group of students I am proud of, and the Palaeolab, a palaeoecology laboratory built from the ground up. In 2026 I moved to the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand as a Senior Researcher, and I remain a Research Associate at Nelson Mandela University. My focus going forward is to keep building capacity in palaeoecology and palaeoenvironmental science in South Africa: training postgraduates, and strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration across southern Africa and further afield.

I served as Vice-President of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) from 2020 to 2023, and as President of the Southern African Society for Quaternary Research (SASQUA) from 2019 to 2022.

Research interests

  • Palaeoenvironments of southern Africa
  • Palynology: fossil pollen, pollen-vegetation calibrations and modern pollen monitoring
  • Palaeoecology and its role in biodiversity and conservation biology, especially pertaining to the Cape Floristic Region
  • Climate change in southern Africa, specifically the impact of future climate change on ecosystems
  • Palaeoclimatology and palaeooceanography
  • Physical environmental sciences: southern African geomorphology and geology
  • Geochronology: late Quaternary dating methods and modelling approaches
  • Stable isotope ecology and its application to environmental research
  • Remote sensing and GIS and their environmental applications

Elsewhere

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