Dr Jane Bunting
| Biography | Jane Bunting is a long term ecologist with research interests focused on better understanding of the long term ecological dynamics of cultural landscapes, mostly from pollen records. She went to university intending to be a physicist and got distracted along the way - after earning a degree (final year in Botany) and PhD at Cambridge, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher in Waterloo, Ontario, and at the University of Stirling before joining the University of Hull, initially as a lecturer, in 1997. She currently works mainly on modelling pollen dispersal and deposition as a tool for reconstructing past land cover and is part of various international working groups, including PolLandCal, Landclim and PAGES Landcover6k. She also coordinates the Virtual Palaeosciences project, which seeks to increase inclusion and equity through developing virtual and digital teaching resources for use alongside more traditional field and practical work in the field. |
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| Research Interests | palaeoecology long term ecology ecology and climate change cultural landscapes environment environmental archaeology landscape ecology Quaternary science environmental change pollen analysis plant community ecology woodlands wetlands mires |
| Teaching and Learning | My teaching falls mostly into these three topic areas: conservation, ecology and biogeography environmental change science research methods and study skills ("how to be a geographer/environmental scientist/geologist") As soon as I learn new things, I _need_ to tell other people about them - teaching and research are both central to my career and practice. I think of what I do as supporting students along the way to being independent lifelong learners, and I am currently particularly interested in helping students (especially those who are the first in their families to attend university) to understand what is expected of them at university and in making sure that all my classes include support for development of life-long learning skills such as reflective practice and writing skills. |
| Scopus Author ID | 57195400122 |
| PhD Supervision Availability | Yes |
| PhD Topics | Jane welcomes applications on any topic related to the use of pollen data and allied methods to reconstruct past environments - including developing methods, proof of concept, and application to archaeological, ecological or applied (e.g. conservation) problems. These projects can be centered on working with sediment cores, on modern pollen-vegetation relationships, or on working largely with secondary data and computer models. The HUMPOL and LandPolFlow (the MSA reconstruction approach) software suites were developed in Hull. Her own work is primarily in the northern hemisphere temperate and boreal zones, but she collaborates widely and is happy to consider projects in any part of the world. Current and recent PhD supervisions - Luke Michno-Neville (2021-present) (Centre for Water Cultures) - Living on the Edge: Surviving and thriving in the Holocene Humberhead Levels - Thya van den Berg (2020-present) (THYME project) - Linking landscape processes and bioeconomies through translation of pollen archives - Hywel Lewis (2015 - 2020) (University of Bradford) - Interactions between human industry and woodland ecology in the South Pennines: 1600 - present - Yiman Fang (2015 - 2019) - Understanding the relationships between surface pollen and vegetation in southeast China: an aid to reconstruct past vegetation dynamics during Little Ice Age (Yiman is now a post-doctoral researcher at Zhejiang University, China) |