Dr Catherine Yansa recently "set up a shop" in the Department of Geography of Michigan State University (MSU) where she is continuing her Late Quaternary pollen and plant macrofossil research. Her doctoral research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison involved reconstructing the vegetation changes that occurred on the northeastern Great Plains from approximately 11,500 (after deglaciation) to 6000 yr BP (mid-Holocene) through the study of both pollen and plant macrofossils. As a tenure-track assistant professor at MSU in East Lansing, Catherine will engage in similar paleobotanical investigations on both sides of the United States-Canada border in the North Plains and Great Lakes regions. She has already begun a project with Christina Kulas, a Ph.D. candidate at MSU, which involves reconstructing pre-settlement and post-settlement forest changes in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan by using pollen, plant macrofossils, land surveyor records, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Remote Sensing (RS).

Currently, only temporary laboratory facilities are available for fossil analysis pending a move in one or two years into a different building. Microscopy equipment recently acquired for this lab includes a Leica DM LB compound microscope (for pollen), a Leica MZ6 zoom stereomicroscope (for macrofossils), and a Q-Imaging micropublisher digital camera with Image Pro Express imaging software.

Catherine is one of the core faculty in a newly formed Quaternary Landscapes Research Group (QLRG) at MSU, which is an informal group of researchers on campus who are actively reconstructing prehistoric landscapes, particularly those in Michigan.

Website: http://www.geo.msu.edu/qlrg/

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Note: This article first appeared in CAP Newsletter 25(2):15, 2002.