Undergraduate student Eleanor Pendle (Brasenose College) has been awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Social and Cultural Geography Research Group Undergraduate Dissertation Prize for research she conducted on the superblock in Poblenou, Barcelona.

Congratulations to Patricia Daley (Professor of the Human Geography of Africa), who has been recognised in the influential Black Powerlist 2021, published by Powerlist Magazine on 17 November.

A new study involving Dr Julie Durcan challenges the long-held view that the destruction of Central Asia's medieval river civilizations was a direct result of the Mongol invasion in the early 13th century CE.

Research by School of Geography and the Environment graduate Jemima Richardson-Jones (Keble College) has been Highly Commended by the Royal Geographical Society's Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group as part of their 2020 Undergraduate Dissertation Prize.

MSc/MPhil in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance students were asked to research a topic of their choice, within the broad remit of the Governance, Politics and Policy theme, and to create a video accompanied by a blog which further outlined the topic. Watch the winning video and read the accompanying blog.

While Arctic tundra greening and browning have received increasing attention over the past decade, one comparatively understudied area is the role of sea ice dynamics and decline as drivers of terrestrial vegetation change and the ecological consequences. A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, reveals two important insights that will have important implications for tundra productivity and vegetation-climate feedback. Read in full.

Congratulations to Ed Sandford whose dissertation, "Insights from an investigation into phases of accumulation and lateral migration of a linear dune, Northeast United Arab Emirates", has received a special commendation in the Quaternary Research Association's annual dissertation prize.

Associate Professor in Quantitative Social Science Methods

Hundreds of millions of tons of dust are blown off the Sahara desert each year. This dust interferes with the climate system and is capable of both cooling and heating the atmosphere depending on its height, size, shape and colour. It also interacts with cloud formation and weather systems like tropical cyclones. Being able to represent the location and quantity of dust in models is really important as these are the tools we use to make weather forecasts and climate projections.

A new study, published this week in BioScience, considers the future of ecology, where technical advancement toward a multidimensional science will continue to fundamentally shift the way we view, explore, and conceptualize the natural world.