Leonardo A. Villacís

I am continuously intrigued by our diatom friends. My initial research was focused on using diatom records from lakes in Chile, usually in Patagonia, to reconstruct the climatic and environmental history since the last Ice Age. Patagonia is very sensitive to changes in the Southern Westerly Winds so we (=Quaternary Paleoecology Laboratory, Universidad de Chile) hoped that high-resolution diatom records would tell us about how this climatic system has varied on centennial to multimillennal time scales. Although we keep working on expanding the set of diatom records for this region of the world, we noticed that much is needed regarding the basic taxonomy and ecology of the species that dominate these lakes. Today I am working on just that at the University of Maine as a PhD student with Dr. Jasmine Saros as my advisor. Through the combination of contemporary and paleo-ecology, my dissertation work is focused on the hypothesis that there is more to Aulacoseira than meets the eye, especially for the so-called A. distans complex.