Bullard Spotlight: Wyatt Oswald on Reconstructing Past Environmental Change

Bullard Fellow Wyatt Oswald, an Associate Professor of Science at Emerson College in Boston, has been affiliated with the Harvard Forest for more than a decade. Working closely with Harvard Forest collaborators David Foster and Elaine Doughty, he analyzes lake-sediment cores to reconstruct past environmental changes.

During his Bullard Fellowship, Oswald has synthesized various types of paleoecological data from Cape Cod and the adjacent islands to study long-term changes in climate, vegetation, and fire. He chose to work at Harvard Forest for its "outstanding facilities and a strong tradition of using retrospective ecology to understand forest dynamics and inform conservation, management, and policy."

• Watch a Harvard Forest student film about paleoecology: "Secrets of the Mud"
  
• Learn more about the Charles Bullard Fellowship program.

Photo by David Foster: Oswald and summer research student Lindsay Day label a sediment core collected from Hemlock Hollow on Prospect Hill.