With over 75 abstracts submitted for posters and talks, this conference featured a great variety of research areas, but was small enough for intimacy, great discussion and exchanges of ideas and information. The conference took place over four beautiful autumn days on the Niagara Peninsula.

The meeting opened with a public lecture by Dr James Dickson, University of Glasgow. Dr Dickson directed the palynological and bryological study of Ötzi, the 5300-year-old ice mummy from the Tyrol region of the Alps. His talk showcased the power of pollen and other plant remains to improve conclusions drawn from other artefacts and analyses. For example, it was initially thought that Ötzi died in the fall or winter; however, examination of non-acetolized Ostrya pollen grains from the colon revealed that cell contents were intact. Since cell contents normally decay rapidly, this finding suggests that death could not have occurred long after pollen production in hop hornbeam, probably in spring or early summer.

Archaeological applications of palynology continued to be an important theme at the conference. Ed Reinhardt put together a session featuring ten talks on geoarchaeological applications of micropaleontology. Of interest to many in that session, Jock McAndrews gave a talk about recent work at Crawford Lake, a meromictic lake in southern Ontario first examined 30 years ago. The varved lake became famous for its high resolution pollen record which led to the discovery of an Iroquoian village site adjacent to it. Further collaborative work has shown that the chronology of the record is more complex than originally thought. Jock also mentioned the great increases in papers we have seen over the years at the AASP meetings, emphasizing how palynological study has expanded in its methods and applications, and has continued to garner great interest from the fields of geography, ecology, geology and archaeology.

The variety of talks presented over the three days showed that many palynologists are now using a diversity of other indicators to complement their pollen records. The non-pollen indicators addressed at the meeting included charcoal, diatoms, dinoflagellate cysts, forams, nematodes, nitrogen isotopes, phytoliths, plant macrofossils and rotifers. The participation of NAMS and micropaleontologists working with indicators other than pollen enriched the meeting. Peter McLaughlin, incoming president of NAMS, encouraged all delegates to get more involved with NAMS.

Some talks illustrated the ways in which palynologists have been incorporating more recent developments in science into their methodology. For example, the well attended ‘Pragmatic Palynology’ session (convened by McAndrews) featured talks focussing on statistical methods (Beck and Stother) and processing techniques (Riding).

The papers presented spanned a wide geographic region, addressing paleoenvironments across most of Canada from Newfoundland to the Arctic to coastal British Columbia and some sites in the US, with one session focussing solely on the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains of North America (convened by P. McLaughlin). Other geographic areas addressed at the meeting included Cuba (Peros), Turkey (Goodman and Reinhardt), the Antarctic Peninsula (Grube and Mohr), Asia (east Asia by Little and McCarthy, western North Pacific by Findley, McCarthy, and Brand, and South China Sea by Kawamura, Kienast, and Kuhnt), Venezuela (Demchuk and Morley), Utah (Davis and Moutoux), Argentina (Pramparo et al.), South Africa (de Villiers and Wigley) and the Baltic Sea region (Head). The research presented also spanned a swath of geological time from work on the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale (Gostlin et al.) to studies of modern pollen deposition (Beecher and Chmura). Conference delegates came from a variety of academic disciplines as well as government and industry, increasing the perspectives encountered at the meeting.

Tim Patterson organized a well attended session on palynological applications in ecology; those talks generated many questions and much discussion. Sessions on General Terrestrial Palynology (Gostlin) and General Marine Palynology (McCarthy) were also very well received.

Two sessions were held on the final day of the conference. In the CAP-sponsored session on Land-Sea Correlations in the Quaternary/Cenozoic, which was convened by Alwynne Beaudoin and Martin Head, we heard a selection of papers related to terrestrial pollen and spores and freshwater algae records preserved in ocean-bottom sediments and collected by deep-sea drilling, many of which document late Cenozoic cooling. There were also papers related to dinoflagellates cysts and foraminifera fossil assemblages impacted by additions of terrigenous sediment, particular carbonate, and the effects of those on primary productivity.

In the afternoon session entitled ‘Origins and Evolution of Microfossils: Links Between Evolutionary History and Paleoenvironmental Changes’, which was convened by Paul Falkowski, Miriam Katz, and Oscar Schofield, we learned about changing paleoenvironments since the Cambrian and how these are linked with a wide range of extinct and extant microfossil taxa. Several papers related fossil eukaryotic phytoplankton assemblages to marine primary productivity (Falkowski; Martin; Strother). Papers were also presented specifically on the topic of the paleobiology of dinoflagellates (van de Schootbrugge; Feist-Burkhardt and Dunn) and calcareous nannofloras (Tremolada and Erba). Presented were a paper focused on the evolution of foraminifera (Patterson, Fowler, and Huber), and another paper which identified the oldest known foraminifera in Nova Scotia as having taxonomic affinities to modern marsh-dwelling taxa (Scott, Medioli and Braund). A paper about the evolution of Cenozoic diatoms (Finkel, Katz, Schofield and Falkowski) and pollen (Martinez-Hernandez and Ramirez-Arriaga) in relation to their paleoenvironments wrapped up this session.

A poster session and catered lunches facilitated discussion and idea exchange. The intimate nature of this meeting was beneficial to students and others seeking to meet more people and get feedback on their work. Many of us enjoyed seeing familiar faces, catching up with old colleagues and establishing new contacts.

Congratulations to Francine McCarthy and Kevin Gostlin for putting together a successful and stimulating meeting.

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This article first appeared in CAP Newsletter 23(2):17-18, 2003.