Aly Baumgartner

Our next Baylor University WISE Graduate Student Seminar Speaker is Aly Baumgartner. Aly Baumgartner is working on her PhD with Dr. Dan Peppe in the Department of Geosciences here at Baylor University. Her talk is entitled “I speak for the trees: what plants can tell us about climate.”

Summary: I study the relationship between leaves and climate. The size and shape of leaves is closely tied to temperature and precipitation. We can use this relationship to estimate the ancient climate or “paleoclimate”. However, we can’t predict the past unless we also understand the present. Current fossil leaf based paleoclimate models are based primarily on temperate Northern Hemisphere floras and include no data from Africa. Here I will discuss how I study modern African leaves and climate in order to improve our paleoclimate models and to estimate the paleoclimate from the fossil leaves of Rusinga Island, Kenya.