NEWS SPOTLIGHT

Read the full UBC Science article here: Even after adopting cattle, early herders kept hunting and gathering 

Dr. Kendra Chritz, Geochemist and Assistant Professor in EOAS, and a team of international collaborators have contributed new insights into the diets and lifeways of the earliest herders in eastern Africa, revealing that people continued hunting, fishing, and gathering long after adopting livestock. The study, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), helps fill a major gap in understanding how early food production developed during a period of rapid environmental change. 

The research focused on early herder communities living in the Turkana Basin, primarily located within modern Kenya and Ethiopia, of roughly 5,000 years ago. By analysing carbon isotopes preserved in human tooth enamel, the team reconstructed ancient diets and found that these early herders maintained highly varied food sources despite keeping cattle, sheep, and goats. “Rather than relying entirely on those livestock, they still maintained a really variable diet, like the fisher-foragers that came before them,” says Dr. Chritz.

The findings suggest that dietary flexibility may have helped these communities adapt to major climatic shifts occurring at the time, including rapid drying and dramatic lake-level decline in the region. The work also highlights the importance of eastern Africa in the broader history of food production and human adaptation. “It fills in this record that was missing for a really long period of time and gives us this more holistic picture of how people might have coped with large-scale environmental changes in prehistory,” shared Dr. Chritz.  

The project brought together an international group of archaeologists, geochemists, and collaborators from the National Museums of Kenya, building on more than a decade of partnership and field research. Alongside the dietary analysis, the team also worked to carefully document and consolidate museum collections to reduce unnecessary repeat sampling of human remains and support long-term stewardship of the collections. 

The Wheaton Walk Through Time, an outdoor interpretive exhibit along the southeast side of the Earth Sciences Building, has received an Award of Excellence from the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects. 

Completed in 2022, the exhibit transforms the pedestrian route between the Pacific Museum of Earth and the Beaty Biodiversity Museum into a 110-metre linear timeline through 4.5 billion years of Earth history. The installation presents geological and biological change in 100-million-year intervals, helping visitors experience the scale of geological time and key evolutionary milestones as they walk between the museums. Ending with the Tree of Life at the entrance of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, the exhibit highlights the connection between biodiversity, evolution, and Earth’s changing environments, while underpinning the value of collaboration between earth and ecological sciences. 

Designed by PWL Partnership Landscape Architects Inc., the project was lauded for its ability to communicate “complex geological and biological concepts through spatial sequencing, materiality, colour and form.” The award recognises the exhibit’s success in turning scientific research and museum interpretation into an accessible public learning experience.

EOAS congratulates everyone involved in bringing the project to life, from the original 2014 concept proposed by Tara Ivanochko and Stuart Sutherland during the early planning of the Earth Sciences Building, through the multi-year design and development process from 2018–2022. This included leadership from Kirsten Hodge and the Pacific Museum of Earth team in shaping the interpretive experience, in close collaboration with the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, PWL Partnership Landscape Architects, EOAS, and the Faculty of Science Development Office. EOAS also gratefully acknowledges the support of Wheaton Precious Metals, whose contribution made the Wheaton Walk Through Time possible. 

In the Prairie Potholes region, spanning the southern Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba prairies, water doesn’t go straight from precipitation and snowmelt to streamflow, its first intercepted and stored by millions of small but densely located wetlands. When a wetland fills up it switches from storing to releasing water. In a system with millions of these wetlands, a sudden switch can have intense effects on downstream river conditions.  

New research from Javad Rahmani (PhD Candidate) and Dr. Ali Ameli (EOAS Assistant Professor), and collaborators at the University of Toronto and Ducks Unlimited, published in Nature Communications,  Earth & Environment, confirms that these wetlands play a central role in determining how much rain and snowmelt becomes streamflow, with implications for flood and drought preparedness and vulnerability, and the regional ecosystem’s water balance. Using 38 years of satellite-based hydrologic maps the authors show that the intercepting role of the wetlands means that the same rainfall or snowmelt event can produce very different streamflow depending on how full the wetland network already is. Small increases in wetland storage can trigger large changes in runoff if the wetlands were already pretty full, or a large rainfall can have no impacts if they were empty, but the relationship is not uniform throughout the Prairie potholes regions.  

The expanse of the region and immense number of wetlands means that modelling every wetland is impossible – the necessary information often doesn’t exist even if there was enough time and resources for millions of models. A study by Rahmani, Ameli, and coauthor Chaopeng Shen at the University of Pennsylvania published in Water Resources Research, tackles this problem: how do we predict wetland outflow behaviour where streamflow gauges and detailed wetland inventories are sparse? Rahmani and co-authors developed a physics-informed deep learning model to combine what data was available with the principles of how wetlands store, release, and connect water. Applied across catchments, the model predicted streamflow and pothole water storage more accurately and consistently than purely data-driven approaches, allowing for reliable predictions to be made in ungauged watersheds.  

This research highlights the risks involved in Alberta’s new wetland policy, which came into effect in March and exempts farmers from wetland preservation rules if the wetland is only filled seasonally based on a 17-week cutoff. This seasonal cutoff is a concern for Dr. Ameli, who argues that these seasonally dry wetlands are those with the highest buffering capacity, meaning that if you remove them, you may be increasing downstream flood risks dramatically. “A fixed 17-week cutoff ignores the fact that the same pothole that holds water for 8 weeks in a dry year may hold water for 22 weeks in a wet year,” explained Ameli, “once cultivated through in a dry year, it cannot buffer the wet year when it matters most.”  

Pacific Museum of Earth (PME) colleagues Frederick Oliver Beeby Maglaque, PME Exhibition Researcher and UBC Master’s student in Art History, and Dr. Kirsten F. Hodge, PME Director and Lecturer in EOAS, published an article today in The Conversation. 

In their piece, Oli and Kirsten explore how Netflix’s The Dinosaurs docuseries revisits long-standing narratives of empire and conquest in the way dinosaurs are imagined and represented. Drawing connections from the Crystal Palace dinosaur sculptures unveiled in 1854 to contemporary dinosaur media such as Jurassic Park, the article discusses how these stories often frame life on Earth as a story of conquest and reflect ideas of human mastery over nature.

Read the full article here: Netflix’s ‘The Dinosaurs’ rehashes a very old story — of empire and conquest

EOAS remembers Professor Stephen Pond, who passed away on March 23, 2026, and extends our sincere condolences to his family and friends. Steve was a distinguished physical oceanographer and long-time member of the UBC and EOAS community, serving as a professor from 1971 to 1996. He began with the Institute of Oceanography, later the Department of Oceanography, and continued as Professor Emeritus following the merger that formed EOAS. He earned his B.Sc. (Honours, Physics–Mathematics, 1962) and Ph.D. (1965) from UBC.

Over the course of his career, Steve made foundational contributions to physical oceanography, particularly in air–sea interaction and coastal ocean processes. His achievements were recognized with numerous honours, including a UBC Killam Senior Fellowship at Princeton’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (1987), the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society President’s Prize (1991), and the Tully Medal (2003). His research significantly advanced understanding of circulation, dynamics, and mixing in British Columbia’s coastal waters. Through long-term observations and innovative numerical modelling, he helped elucidate the complex interactions among wind, runoff, and tidal forcing in systems such as the Strait of Georgia, Knight Inlet, and Sechelt Inlet, laying important groundwork for modern studies of coastal circulation and environmental processes. He was equally well known for his book "Introductory Dynamical Oceanography" written with his friend and mentor, George Pickard, which is still a standard textbook used today.

He will be remembered for his scientific leadership, his dedication to research and education, and his lasting impact on generations of students and colleagues. Our thoughts are with his family, friends, and colleagues during this difficult time.

Congratulations to Dr. Sean Crowe, who has been selected as a recipient of the 2026 UBC Killam Faculty Research Prize in the Sciences and Applied Sciences category.   

Established in 1986, the Killam Research Prizes are supported by an endowment created through a bequest from the late Dorothy J. Killam and are awarded annually to ten outstanding researchers at UBC. The Killam Research Prizes are among the university’s most distinguished honors, celebrating faculty across various disciplines who have demonstrated exceptional research excellence, significant scholarly impacts in their fields, and national and/or international research leadership.    

Dr. Crowe is a Canada Research Chair in Geomicrobiology and a Professor in the Departments of Earth, Ocean, & Atmospheric Sciences and Microbiology & Immunology at UBC. His work focuses on developing conceptual and numerical models of biogeochemical cycling and the coupled evolution of Earth surface chemistry and life. His interdisciplinary research spans multiple scales of space and time, from mineral-microbe interactions to global processes, and from the Precambrian through to the Anthropocene.   

At the Crowe lab, researchers investigate microbiological and geochemical processes in natural and engineered environments to find new solutions for problems in the energy, resource, and health sectors. Their work explores a wide range of questions, including: 1) how did the Earth come to support complex animal life and humans; 2) how will biogeochemical cycles respond to the emergence of humans as geobiological agents; and 3) how can we harness the ingenuity of microbial communities to mitigate pain-points arising from increased human demands on water, energy, mineral, and agricultural resources.