Image courtesy of Juliet Sefton
Every year, the Society's Geographical Club Award supports two outstanding fieldwork projects - one within human geography, and one within physical geography. This year, Juliet Sefton, a PhD student in the Department of Geography at Durham University, received the £1,000 Geographical Club Award for her research on mangroves and Holocene sea level reconstruction.
Mangrove sediments are valuable recorders of sea level changes during the Holocene; however, a better understanding of sedimentary processes and compositions in mangrove environments is needed to provide higher resolution reconstructions of recent sea level changes. Juliet spent all of July in the Seychelles, selecting the island of Mahé as her fieldsite for its easily accessible mangroves, small tidal range, and high diversity of mangrove species. Her objectives were to examine pollen sea level proxies through a comparison of annual pollen trap and modern sediment surface samples, and to investigate new organic geochemistry sea level proxies from mangrove sediments. Her fieldwork involved mapping vegetation and elevation patterns, collecting surface sediment and short-cores, collecting leaf samples and deploying pollen traps.
You can follow Juliet on Twitter @SeftonGeo