It’s just the sort of thing that’s supposed to happen at an institution like Fordham, said Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., provost of the University, in opening remarks.

“Arguably, artificial intelligence is the most revolutionary technology in our lifetime, and it brings boundless opportunity and significant risk,” he said at the University’s second annual data science and AI symposium, held April 11 at the Lincoln Center campus. “Fordham’s mission as a Jesuit university inspires us to seek the greater good in all things, including developing responsible AI to benefit society.”

The theme of the day was “Empowering Society for the Greater Good.” Presenters included faculty and students—both graduate and undergraduate—from roughly a dozen disciplines. Their research ran the gamut: using AI chatbots to promote mental health; enhancing flood awareness in New York City; helping math students learn to write proofs; and monitoring urban air quality, among others.

The event drew 140 people, mostly students and faculty who came to learn more about how AI is advancing research across disciplines at Fordham.

Student Project Enhances Medical Research

Deenan He, a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, presented a new method for helping researchers interpret increasingly vast amounts of data in the search for new medical treatments. In recent years, “the biomedical field has seen an unprecedented surge in the amount of data generated” because of advancing technology, said He, who worked with natural sciences assistant professor Stephen Keeley, Ph.D., on her research.

From Granting Loans to Predicting Criminal Behavior, AI Must Be Fair

Keynote speaker Michael Kearns, Ph.D., a computer and information science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke about bias concerns that arise when AI models are used for deciding on consumer loans, the risk of criminals’ recidivism, and other areas. Ensuring fairness requires explicit instructions from developers, he said, but noted that giving such instructions for one variable—like race, gender, or age—can throw off accuracy in other parts of the model.

Audits of models by outside watchdogs and activists—“a healthy thing,” he said—can lead to improvements in the models’ overall accuracy. “It is interesting to think about whether it might be possible to make this adversarial dynamic between AI activists and machine learning developers less adversarial and more collaborative,” he said.

Another presentation addressed the ethics of using AI in managerial actions like choosing which employees to terminate, potentially keeping them from voicing fairness concerns. “It changes, dramatically, the nature of the action” to use AI for such things, said Carolina Villegas-Galaviz, Ph.D., a visiting research scholar in the Gabelli School of Business, who is working with Miguel Alzola, Ph.D., associate professor of law and ethics at the Gabelli School, on incorporating ethics into AI models.

‘These Students Are Our Future’

In her own remarks, Ann Gaylin, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said “I find it heartening to see our undergraduate and graduate students engaging in such cutting-edge research so early in their careers.”

“These students are our future,” she said. “They will help us address not just the most pressing problems of today but those of tomorrow as well.”

Working with one of her Fordham professors at the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience, Rabia Gondur devised an innovative way to understand how an insect’s brain functions during natural movements.

When you do something simple like pick up your phone or wash your hands, what’s happening in your brain? Quite a lot, actually—neurons are firing everywhere because of all your minor movements, not to mention background activities like respiration.

“Your brain is not just stopping to do this one activity,” said Rabia Gondur, FCLC ’22, a computational research scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. “It’s very noisy in the brain.”

Cutting through this noise to see which movements fire which neurons is the subject of her research, which she’ll soon present at a prestigious international conference on machine learning.

Gondur devised an innovative approach with help from one of her professors, Stephen Keeley, Ph.D.—a collaboration that began easily during her senior year when his presentation in one of her capstone courses spoke to her interest in research. “I just reached out to him, and he was super accommodating,” she said.

They worked on the research while Gondur—an integrative neuroscience major—completed the requirements for the accelerated master’s degree program in data science at Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, after which she landed her job at Cold Spring, where she is part of a computational neuroscience research group.

She will present her research at one of the world’s leading forums for machine learning, the annual International Conference on Learning Representations, taking place in Vienna, Austria, in May.

Using Machine Learning to Study Day-to-Day Brain Function

Gondur’s research is one of many studies seeking to understand a brain’s response during complex, natural behaviors, building on prior studies of more basic movements—for instance, what happens in a monkey’s brain when it reaches left versus right in response to a prompt.

The eventual goal is to get beyond laboratory studies to see, in detail, how the human brain naturally functions. “That’s ultimately what neuroscientists are interested in understanding, is how the brain works in our day-to-day lives,” said Keeley, an assistant professor of natural science who runs a machine learning lab on the Lincoln Center campus.

But to work toward this goal, scientists have to start small—literally. For their study, Keeley and Gondur examined the brains of insects: a fly grooming itself and a moth flitting around to follow a moving image of a flower. For this, they relied on data that their collaborators at other universities gathered using brain imaging technology.

Keeley and Gondur devised a machine learning algorithm to find links between the bugs’ brain signals and the subtleties of their movements, as captured in video stills. It differs from similar algorithms because they added processes to make the measurements more precise and the results easier to interpret.

A New Tool for Brain Research

Such techniques could one day illuminate everything from brain-based diseases to variances in people’s motor skills, Keeley said. For now, their model gives a new tool to scientists trying to tease out relationships hidden in complex data. “If you are interested in genomics, if you’re interested in medicine, if you’re interested in just anything, you can basically tweak the model,” Gondur said.

Keeley is always working with undergraduates on research projects tailored to their skill level. “Rabia came in with quite a good amount of talent, and so I was able to give her a very challenging project, and she was very successful,” he said.

As with any urban habitat, invasive species, both flora and fauna, are a constant problem for caretakers. Kylie Rothwell and Julia Duljas, natural science majors at Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC), recently worked alongside those caretakers to learn about these species and habitat restoration.

Rothwell, a junior who interned at Wave Hill the fall of 2018, created the internship for herself. The center has a robust educational program for teens, particularly during the summer, but they didn’t have a college-level internship program. With the encouragement of Mark Botton, Ph.D., biology professor and co-director of the Environmental Science Project, Rothwell took the initiative to send an email and set up a meeting; soon she was hired to work on various research projects, and quickly thereafter was asked to go outdoors on native species restoration with high schoolers.

“At first, it was discouraging because we would go and we would spend three hours [removing invasive species]and it would look great for that week and then we’d come back next week and do it all over again,” she said. “But it is really interesting because high school students didn’t know about the problem. So, I think it is good to spread awareness even if we’re still working on what are the best ways to kind of combat it.”

Duljas asked Rothwell for the contact info and soon found herself working in environmental education too, coordinating various high school programs and taking students out onto the grounds to pull out Italian Arum, a plant whose red flowers make them easy to spot in the forest’s wintertime grey.

Both women are planning to pursue careers in environmental science.

Alix Cotumaccio, Wave Hill’s director of education, encouraged Fordham students with “the passion and drive” to reach out about potential opportunities. She said that her department may not always have capacity or budget to support an internship, but there are other opportunities within Wave Hill.

Take the Initiative or Tap in to Existing Resources

Rothwell and Duljas’ experience is exactly the kind that Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC), gets excited by.

Auricchio said the University works hard to provide opportunities through a variety of programs to all undergraduate students. She encouraged students to contact Career Services, as well as to strike out on their own.

“Students know best what they want, whenever they see a chance they should feel prepared to create their own opportunities and we’ll be here to support them,” she said.

Summer Research Grant Deadline is Approaching

Though spring has yet to arrive, it’s already high time to start planning for summer break. For some undergraduate students, that means thinking about upcoming summertime research and internship deadlines.

The deadlines for several opportunities are fast approaching, such as the March 6 deadline to apply for the Fordham College at Lincoln Center Dean’s Summer Research Grant. The grants are open to STEM and liberal arts students alike, and are driven by what the students want to explore, said Auricchio.

“These grants are not for students to serve as research assistants to help faculty; it’s the other way around. Faculty help students in their research,” she said. “Students come up with the ideas, and they find faculty mentors to help them see their project to completion.”

In addition to research opportunities, paid internships provide real-world learning opportunities, said Auricchio. She noted that employers increasingly view internship experience as equally important as academic credentials. She acknowledged, however, that many internships pay far too low—if at all—for some students to be able to take them on.

Auricchio recently teamed with Maura Mast, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, to fund four internships at the New-York Historical Society. The internships include working in IT, the communications department, the society’s renowned library, or the museum department.

“We’re committed to ensuring that students who cannot afford to work for no pay have the same opportunities as students who gain that kind of work experience and engage with the tremendous resources of New York City,” she said.

Real-World Urgency

For Duljas, engaging with a public garden in the northwest corner of the city gave her the chance to address a pressing issue in the natural world.

“We’re experiencing rapid extinctions all over the world because these invasive species are coming in and out-competing the native species, and that threatens other ecosystems—everything’s connected,” she said. “Having the high school kids go out into the woodlands of Wave Hill and actually see the problem for themselves really helps them understand the issue at hand.”

Plum Beach, a spit of land sandwiched between Jamaica Bay and the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, will never be mistaken for Coney Island or the Rockaways. Its amenities are few, there is no access to mass transportation, and the sand is littered with untold detritus from the sea.

It’s also heaven for Limulus polyphemus, aka the Atlantic horseshoe crab.

On a recent afternoon at high tide, three teams of researchers led by Fordham biology professor Mark Botton, Ph.D., waded into the waters of the bay and methodically plucked one of the oldest animal species in the world from the surf. Armed with measuring tape, calipers, and notebooks, they recorded data such as the size of the crab’s carapace, its sex, and whether it had seaweed, barnacles, or slipper shells on it.

The crabs had come to the beach to mate, just as they have been doing for an estimated 450 million years. Clumps of as many as a dozen crabs crowded around each other, occasionally flipping over when a high wave swept in.

Botton, who grew up in nearby Midwood, has been coming to Plum Beach since 2011, shortly after the south side of the beach was replenished to alleviate severe erosion. The north side, which is slightly more protected from the Atlantic Ocean, was never rebuilt, and as such, it is where the crabs gather. Since global warming is expected to cause seas to rise in the future, Botton said beach replenishment projects will become more common.

“All things being equal, if you have a choice of what kind of sand to put on the beach, it makes a difference for the crabs. We’d like to be able to inform future policy, because if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it in a way that provides a maximum benefit for wildlife, as well as people,” he said.

Horseshoe crabs play a vital part in the ecosystem as predators of small fish and mollusks, and also as prey for migrating shore birds that feast on their eggs. Their blood is also used by pharmaceutical companies to test cancer drugs.

Karine Khoder, a rising Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) senior from Bay Ridge who is concentrating on organismal biology with the goal of attending medical school, also said that their fearsome appearance belies the fact that they’re utterly harmless to humans.

“You can stick your fingers all up in their claws, and they won’t do anything; they’re not strong enough to hurt you,” she said.

“It’s cool to see the crabs are relatively the same as they were hundreds of millions of years ago. I think that’s impressive. They’re doing something right.”

Khoder accompanied Botton, along with fellow FCLC classmate Adam Aly, who grew up in Flushing, Queens, and became familiar with the crabs when he worked as a lifeguard in the Rockaways. Like Khoder, he hopes the research he’s conducting on the crabs this summer will help him gain admission to medical school.

Christina Colon, FCRH 99, assistant professor of biology at Kingsborough Community College, also brought several students for the count.

“It’s not just the crabs. Students see migratory birds they’ve never seen before, sharks, sea turtles, stingrays—these are things that they don’t get to see firsthand,” she said.

“It changes the way they look at New York, the way they look at nature, and the way they look at their ability to do real science.”

After a few hours of counting, the three teams dug into the sand to harvest some eggs. They evaluated 300 crabs in total, and, as expected, they encountered roughly four males for every female. That’s because females, which are larger, tend to burrow into the sand, release eggs, and then depart, while the smaller males visit the shore at every high tide.

The population of Limulus polyphemus is healthy in this part of the country, said Botton, but they’re still a great research focus.

“To have science students develop a small project on their own that they can take ownership of, and take pride in, is a really important part of the learning experience at Fordham,” he said.

“We want to encourage them to get involved in research, and understand that it isn’t just performing a cookbook recipe out of a lab manual. At some point, you have to sit down and think about ‘what would I like to demonstrate, and how can I test this hypothesis, get data, work with the data, and eventually give a presentation.’”
[doptg id=”89″]

Listen here:

Patrick Verel: This is Patrick Verel, and today I’m speaking with Guy Robinson, a senior lecture in the department of Nashville Sciences at Fordham. What is typically the worst time of year for pollen and how does this year compare to that?

Guy Robinson: This is typically the worst time of year. So late April to early May is usually when the middle of the season is getting underway and what you’ll start to get is a co-occurrence of Birch, and then with Oak, and these are usually the largest numbers that we get of pollen throughout the year, in face.

Patrick Verel: Now there’s typically a certain sequence that the plants follow, right?

Guy Robinson: Yes, absolutely. There is a set sequence, so in that respect the pollen every year is very predictable. So we’ll start out, sometime as early as February we’ll start to see Cyprus pollen that may be mixed in with Elm and Alder and sometimes a bit of Maple. The Maple will then continue to increase and the Cyprus will probably hit it’s peak sometimes in March. Then you start to see other species begin to join in as the Cyprus’s are declining.

Patrick Verel: Talk to me about catkins, which sounds like a delightful cartoon character.

Guy Robinson: Catkins are actual the technical term we use for these structures, the structures that carry many flowers on the trees as they’re releasing the pollen into the air. But what I noticed last week, I noticed in Manhattan here that there were just huge amounts of catkins that had already fallen from the Oak trees. Now this tells me that probably we’re passed the peak for Oak and this tells me also that we’re probably past the peak for pollen in the Manhattan area. There may still be a peak to come in the northern suburbs but I think we’re passed some of the worst of it already, because so many of them are already on the ground, which tells us that the trees have already released the pollen and have dropped the structures that do the job of releasing them.

Patrick Verel: So it’s fair to say to say that if you’re somebody who’s allergic to this type of pollen, that if you’re walking around in the park and you see these on the ground, that might bring you a little bit of sense of relief. Okay, the peak has passed, I might be feeling better in the next few weeks.

Guy Robinson: Yeah that’s true. Certainly if you’re allergic to Oak. If you’re allergic to Hickory, well your trouble is about to begin.

Patrick Verel: Now you monitor a couple of different stations around the New York city area. Can you talk to me a little bit about the differences that you see between the two of them?

Guy Robinson: So we have a station in here in midtown Manhattan on 60th street ,and we have another one up in Armonk, up in the northern suburbs. Now typically, we’re going to see the same sequence of pollen occurring as the season kind of unfolds. So the same sequence of different species will come one after another in a very predictable pattern. The main difference I would say is that typically the 60th street midtown station will start seeing things a day or two early. It doesn’t always happen that way, but usually they’ll be just a little bit earlier.

Patrick Verel: Is there any one kind of pollen that is the one that really drives people nuts when you think about allergies, because this is often what gets people talking about it is when there’s high counts of this stuff.

Guy Robinson: Yeah the ones that are often the real trouble makers … There’s several actually, but the big ones probably are birch and oak and I would say there is also ash, which you don’t usually think about a great deal. There’s also London plain, which is common in the city because so many street trees are London plains. They’re otherwise known as Sycamore, but we also get a lot of Pine pollen, but those don’t tend to me troublesome in terms of allergies.

Patrick Verel: So going forward, what kinds of pollen will we be seeing?

Guy Robinson: We’ll be getting a little bit of grass. We’ve seen a little bit this month already, which is not unusual, but it’ll start to increase towards the end of the month. The grasses, and then will continue into June. There’ll be a second season for grasses that occurs after the summer, so there’s usually a gap in the summer where we don’t get any pollen at all, then we come to a second grass season, which usually starts in around September or October, and then we get the largest amount of grasses. But for the rest of this month, we’ll start to see those grasses coming in for that first season, and then we’ll start to see hickory and walnut and a couple of other late season trees.

Patrick Verel: Is there anything about the northeast that’s unique when it comes to pollen?

Guy Robinson: I wouldn’t say unique exactly, but when you get into what we call the mid latitudes, you tend to get a lot of wind pollinated species. As you go further south, into the subtropics and then the tropics particularly, many more species are pollinated by insects, and those tend to be much less troublesome. Most people who have allergies badly up here in the northeast, if they were to go to the Caribbean for a vacation, they would probably find they don’t get allergies there.

Our genes are coded with explicit instructions for not only what we need to develop, said Alma Rodenas-Ruano, PhD, but also when each developmental process ought to begin.

That question of “when” is at the heart of Rodenas-Ruano’s epigenetics research, which she began as a researcher in the neuroscience department at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and has brought with her to Fordham’s laboratories.

“I’m interested in the neurological events that occur during what we call critical periods of development,” said Rodenas-Ruano, an assistant professor of biology. “As the name suggests, these are critical events that must happen for normal function to occur.”

Genes are subsets of DNA that define the fundamental traits an organism inherits from its parents. They are like a code that gives each cell instructions about what to do—for instance, to develop legs instead of fins or to start growing facial hair.

Epigenetics refers to cellular mechanisms cued by external events that influence whether or not a certain gene becomes active.

“The genetic code is set, but which genes are expressed or not expressed depends on the environment.” Rodenas-Ruano said. “For example, the first time an animal opens its eyes and lets light in, this sets off an epigenetic process of developing vision. If you deprive the eye of light, however, the normal development of those synapses will not occur.”

In the lab, Rodenas-Ruano uses zebrafish to study what happens to normal development if these epigenetic factors are changed or disrupted. Even small stressors, such as temporarily separating a newborn animal from its mother (and the same may be true for newborn humans, Rodenas-Ruano hypothesized) can alter certain epigenetic processes and gene expression as a whole.

“Disrupting this system causes mechanistic changes. The animal may behave normally, but if there’s another stressful event later in its life, that can trigger additional dysregulation in the system,” she said.

The potential benefits of her research could provide new insights for the treatment and prevention of neurological illnesses such as epilepsy or schizophrenia, Rodenas-Ruano said.

“Most diseases are multifactorial, and so we want to understand the exact triggers that make a person vulnerable,” she said. “We first have to identify and understand the basic mechanisms that contribute to normal function. Then, we see what happens if we disrupt these mechanisms—both what happens at first and what happens later on in a mature brain.”

Rodenas-Ruano, who just completed her first year at Fordham, is a recipient of a summer Grass Fellowship, a grant designed to support independent research projects by early career scientists. She is currently at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts with a cohort of researchers from around the world. There, she is undertaking her project, “Epigenetic Regulation of the Cation-Chloride Symporter KCC2 During Neuronal Development.”

“This laboratory is a hub for neuroscientists. Many Nobel Prize winners have worked here. Hodgkin and Huxley discovered how neurons fire (action potentials) here,” she said. “They provide everything, from housing and equipment to a zebrafish facility.”

When she returns to Fordham in the fall, she will have her own zebrafish facility on campus. The space will allow her to involve her undergraduate students in ongoing research projects.

“These are challenging concepts, but my Fordham students have been well prepared and eager to learn,” she said. “I hope we can generate meaningful data and answer some questions about this topic.”

By their very nature, black holes can never been seen. But thanks to advances in technology, scientists were able last year, for the very first time, to actually “listen” to two of them colliding with each other.

On April 7, Luca Matone, PhD, adjunct associate research scientist at the Columbia University Astrophysics Laboratory, explained how scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Washington and Louisiana accomplished something that even Albert Einstein never thought possible.

“That moment set the stage, because my job before was in science fiction; now, after [we heard]that ‘thump,’ it became science,” he told students at the Lincoln Center campus.

In his talk, “Listening to the Universe: The Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger,” Matone reviewed the theory of gravity as it was presented by Sir Isaac Newton and refined by Einstein. That theory, he explained, included the concept of a “fourth dimension” in which space-time is warped by objects such as the sun—or in this case two black holes.

When the two black holes collided and merged together some 1.3 billion years ago, the event released energy in the form of gravitational waves that rippled outward through space-time. (Matone said a good way to think about it would be to imagine a bowling ball placed on a trampoline. If you shook the ball, it would cause ripples on the trampoline surface.)

“When Albert Einstein proposed this [idea]in 1916, he dismissed it right away [even though]he knew that this was one of the consequences of general relativity. By putting the numbers in, he figured out 100 years ago that this was something that we could not possibly detect,” Matone said.

But Einstein surmised incorrectly. The collision/merger was detected on Sept. 14, 2015, using twin L-shaped laser interferometers in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington that utilize lasers and suspended mirrors to achieve their incredible sensitivity to displacements.

Matone said that an enormous amount of energy was released when the black holes merged—one was about 36 times the mass of our sun; the other about 29 times the mass of our sun. The induced effect that was detected in September 2015 was at most 4 x10-18 meters—“an astounding, very, very small number.”

Matone played for the audience a clip of that sound, the signal that LIGO measured and simply sent it to a loudspeaker. A distinct “thump” could be heard. He also showed what the time series of the signal looked like on a graph.

“By observing these ripples, there’s a lot of information about the source. A lot of information about the source can be found just by looking at the frequency of oscillation of the ripples, the amplitude, and what kind of a wave form corresponds with it,” he said.

“Nowadays we have telescopes that can detect optical signals from the heavens. Now, with this machine, we have the ability to look at the universe with different eyes, or if you like, ears.”

The next challenge, he said, will be to build additional detectors that can help pinpoint the location of events. Currently, LIGO scientists listening to the sound of black holes colliding are like persons standing in a room with their eyes closed listening to voices. If asked to identity where in a room someone is talking, they can only point in a general direction. Additional detectors are under construction in India, Japan and Europe, and will make it easier to pinpoint exact locations.

These additions will lead to both cutting edge advances in technology and an expanded understanding of nature of our existence, he said.

“For the first time ever, we observed two merging black holes. No one has ever detected something like this,” he said.

“This is driven by a desire to understand the nature of the universe.”

The key to discovering why the giant herbivores died out may be when their numbers began to dwindle: about 14,800 years ago, according to a team of researchers that includes Fordham’s Guy Robinson. Their 2009 paper, “Pleistocene megafaunal collapse preceded novel plant communities and enhanced fire regimes,” is based upon the concentrations of fossil spores found in lake sediments in the Midwest and northeast.

Robinson, a lecturer in the Department of Natural Sciences at Lincoln Center, tracks Sporormiella, a fungus that produces spores which must pass through the gut of a large herbivore to germinate. The spores are between 9 and 12 microns in diameter (about one-fifth the diameter of a human hair), and are found in the dung of large herbivorous vertebrates like mastodons and giant beavers (did we mention the giant beavers?). Over time the dung would be washed by rain into lakes, where the spores, along with pollen and charcoal, collected in layers of sediment.

Lots of spores means lots of dung; lots of dung means lots of animals. Tracking the amount of spores, pollen and charcoal at different sediment depths allows the changes in numbers of large herbivores to be matched exactly to sediment records of vegetation and fire, which can in turn be compared with other archaeological and environmental records.

Beginning 14,800 years ago, the plant communities of North America started to change dramatically, going by pollen counts from the lake sediments. Robinson, who also oversees the Pollen Index at Fordham, saw a rise in novel or “no-analog” plant communities which had high percentages of temperate broadleaved trees such as ash, hornbeam, ironwood and elm coexisting with northern species such as spruce and larch—trees not found growing together previously, or today.

As the incidence of Sporormiella (and hence large herbivores) declined over a 1,000-year period, the incidence of pollen grains from novel plant communities increased, as did the incidence of charcoal, indicating fires.

What do all of these clues point to? Butchered mammoth bones found in southeastern Wisconsin can be dated to between 14,800 and 14,100 years ago, indicating the presence of humans in the region at the beginning of the decline of large herbivores. One pretty good hypothesis is that over the period between 14,800 and 13,300 years ago, human hunters reduced the population of mammoths, mastodons and other large herbivores. As the herbivores declined, the trees on which they fed, broadleafs like elm and oak, increased, as did the amount of standing and dead wood and leaf litter available to fuel wildfires (and possibly fires set by humans for hunting and land-clearing purposes).

The archeological and fossil records seem to indicate that the population of large herbivores goes extinct altogether between 13,300 and 12,900, which corresponds exactly with the arrival of the Clovis people, big-game specialists named for their stone points first excavated in Clovis, N.M.

Robinson stresses that this interpretation of the record is somewhat controversial: other contenders for the decline and eventual extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna include climate change, an extraterrestrial impact, and disease or some combination of the three, as well as human predation.

But the decline of the large herbivores (as measured by Sporormiella concentrations) precedes the increase of no-analog plant communities. If climate change reduced the number of herbivores, it didn’t do so by changing the habitat. Likewise, the hypothesis that a meteor or comet slammed into North America approximately 13,000 years ago and killed the megafauna isn’t consistent with a gradual decline of the large herbivores, nor the timing of its beginning.

This summer, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) will present the William Skinner Cooper Award to Robinson, along with colleagues Jacquelyn Gill, John Williams, Stephen T. Jackson and Katherine Lininger for their paper, which ESA says “contributes to the fundamental understanding of ecological history in eastern North America.” The award will be given at ESA’s annual meeting in August, in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Meanwhile, Robinson and his colleagues are extending their research by sampling lake sediments in more locations. “The samples our paper was based upon were all from lowland sites,” Robinson says. “We’re now moving into higher elevations in the Shawangunk Mountains, and we’re starting to see indications that the decline in Sporormiella is what you’d expect if it was being caused by human predation: there is a lag in the decline in higher elevations because humans move into the richer lowlands first.”

More evidence to support the hunting hypothesis is also coming to light in sediments from the late Holocene, 200 to 300 years ago, Robinson says. The samples seem to indicate a rebound of large herbivores on a significant scale following Europeans’ first contact with Native Americans. Researchers hypothesize that first-contact epidemics essentially depopulated the continent, drastically reducing hunting pressure on wildlife.

Robinson believes that the data strongly supports human hunting as a prime cause of large herbivore declines and extinctions, but that it may take a while for scientific opinion to come around.

“Like the fact that Africa and the Americas were once joined, many things that seem self evident now were highly controversial when they were first proposed,” he says. “That pre-historical, pre-agricultural people could have such a profound effect on their environment may be hard for people to accept for reasons that have nothing to do with the data.”