Camilla Crifo, newly minted PhD, successfully defended her dissertation today! Her work focused on methods for using phytoliths to understand modern and ancient plant communities. Phytoliths, for those who don’t know, are like little glass cells made by plants and preserved in soil. Camilla did field work in Panama, Argentina, Colombia and Costa Rica, and spent many hours in the lab identifying phytoliths under the microscope.
PhD Keywords: phytolith, paleobotany, plants, field methods, indicators, soil, travel, ancient, plants, communities
