Past vegetation and climate on Bonaire

Presentation Past vegetation and climate on Bonaire, by Island(er)s at the Helm researcher Dr. Kees Nooren (KITLV / Utrecht University). 

Understanding past climate variability and its impacts on the environment and human societies in the Caribbean is essential for interpreting present and future changes. To achieve this, detailed reconstructions of climate, vegetation, and human activity are necessary. Sedimentary archives from the bottoms of coastal lagoons and saliñas offer valuable insights, as they contain microfossils such as pollen, diatoms, and charcoal, which can be used to reconstruct environmental and anthropogenic changes over long timescales.

In this study, I present the results from two sediment cores collected from Saliña Bartol and Saliña Slagbaai on the island of Bonaire. These cores span the past 2,000 years and reveal significant changes in vegetation composition, as evidenced by the pollen record. These shifts are interpreted in relation to climate variability and human activity, as inferred from the diatom and charcoal records. In addition to climatic changes, human-driven factors—such as land use changes, the use of fire, and the introduction of non-native species—emerged as major drivers of environmental transformation on the island.

Kees Nooren is a postdoc researcher in Paleoecology and Climatology within the  Island(er)s at the Helm project. He has a background in Biology (Msc) and obtained his PhD in Physical Geography. He worked and lived in Brazil, Aruba, and Mexico, and  is very  interested in human environmental interactions and human adaptation strategies to past climate change, especially for Mesoamerican and Caribbean societies. He is a specialist in palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimate reconstructions, and is familiar with the application of multiple proxies, including pollen and diatoms.