Jeffery Stone

My research addresses questions about long-term environmental variation. I am particularly interested in the response of ecosystems and aquatic organisms to climate change. I explore this by integrating stratigraphic lake core studies, modeling, and coupling my research with modern ecological experiments to understand pattern of lake response to climate in space and time. I research topics that cover a range of time scales, from millennial to seasonal, in modern environments and throughout the Quaternary.

I specialize in the analysis of fossil diatom assemblages, using paleoecological relationships to reconstruct past lake environments. This research is naturally interdisciplinary and requires a curiosity about climate processes, ranging from large-scale ocean-atmospheric interactions to regional anomalies that impact lakes. I often complement my stratigraphic investigations with studies of modern lake and river systems as an analog for patterns observed in fossil assemblages and conversely reconstruct changes in the natural variability over intermediate time scales to provide a baseline context for changes in modern lake communities that may be impacted by human development or recent climate change.