Neil Davies
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About
Research Area
My research focuses on how life has influenced, and been influenced by, physical sedimentary processes in deep time. Original fieldwork is key to this work, with investigations of strata across six continents dating from the Precambrian to Pliocene. The work of myself and my research team uses the ancient rock record to ascertain how organisms interacted with their physical environment on timescales from months to millions of years and spatial scales from the local to global. Previous work has looked at how early plants revolutionized river processes, with direct analogy to modern fluvial systems, the impact of burrowing behaviours on sediment, and at the challenges and impacts related to the colonization of the land by animals. Techniques including sedimentary logging, facies analysis and mapping are augmented with next generation SEM work and meta-analysis of literature to see how organisms shaped the landscapes that they occupied. This has implications for evolutionary feedbacks in addition to grounding understanding of modern eco- and bio-geomorphic phenomena and processes. A robust understanding of interpretations of ancient environments and timescales at outcrop is essential, and all the research team receive training in these techniques.
Project Interests
I am happy to work with students on any projects that utilize the deep time sedimentary-stratigraphic record, especially in fieldwork-based studies. These studies can relate to any interval of Earth history, but there are clear gaps in knowledge relating to long-term geo-evolutionary feedbacks around the Silurian-Devonian terrestrialization process, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, the Mesozoic evolution of flowering plants, and Cenozoic shifts in life-Earth feedback prior to and during the rise of humans.