In June 2026, Mattias Sjölander visited Utrecht University to host a brainstorming session on integrating subfossil insect and pollen data in future analyses.
The visit, a so-called Short-Term Scientific Mission within Open Palaeoecological Data (PalaeOpen), was funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST).
During my ongoing postdoctoral project at the Center for the Human Past at Uppsala University, I have been working with the subfossil insect data in the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database (SEAD). Insect data is a great source of information on past landscape and climate development and is currently underutilized in large-scale systematic analyses. As I have been exploring the data currently in SEAD, one thing on my mind has been how this valuable information can be better combined with other proxies, in particular palynological data which describes vegetation development.
You can read Matte’s impressions in his post on the PalaeOpen blog:
