Emily Lindsey
Barnosky LabEmail: emily.lindsey@berkeley.edu Phone: (510) 643-6275 Her research: I am interested in Quaternary mammalian paleoecology, specifically looking at changes in ecological communities in southern South America from the late Pleistocene forward. I am also very interested in integrating paleoecology with modern community ecological research and experiments.
Questions to answer: When, where, and why did the megafauna die out during the Pleistocene-Holocene transtion, and what happened in the ambient mammalian communities when they did? More specifically, did the "left behind" mammals (camelids, rodents, etc.) die out with the megafauna or did their populations expand? How did these populations move and change?
First steps: Tony Barnosky and I are starting to put together a FAUNMAP-style database comprising late Quaternary mammalian fossils known from southern Chile and Argentina. This database's interactive interface will allow users to see, as an example, the locations of all the giant sloth remains known from southwestern Chile younger than 18,000 BP.
What she enjoys most: Traveling and playing outside … and the science is pretty cool too! Very little is known to date about the timing and mechanisms of the Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions in South America, so it's exciting to be working in a field where there's so much to discover. I like integrating knowledge from different disciplines (community ecology and paleontology) and I really enjoy the collaborative nature of science, especially fieldwork. It's a great opportunity to share knowledge with and learn from all kinds of brilliant people, all with slightly different areas of expertise, often working in very different parts of the globe. | 
