Glen Macdonald
UC Presidential Chair
and Director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment
t: 310.825.1071
f: 310.206.5976
email: macdonal @geog.ucla.edu
office: 1255 BUNCHE
HOMEPAGE
CURRICULUM VITAE

EDUCATION

B.A. Hons. University of California Berkeley Geography
M.Sc. University of Calgary Geography
Ph.D. University of Toronto Botany

RESEARCH INTERESTS

I study climate change and its impacts on ecosystems and societies. In our lab we reconstruct past climate change and impacts through the use of fossil pollen, fossil stomates, plant macrofossils, insect remains, tree-rings, geochemistry and historical records. We also do work on issues of current and future environmental change with a focus on water scarcity. My lab facilities are relatively extensive and consist of four rooms with full facilities for pollen and plant macrofossil processing and analysis, tree-ring analysis and elementary sedimentological analysis. Field equipment includes livingstone and hiller sediment corers, tree-ring corers and chainsaws, GPS, radios, and misc. field camp supplies. Areas of active field research include California, the northern Great Plains and adjacent Rocky Mountains, the North American subarctic, Russia and Siberia.

AWARDS

Christensen Visiting Fellow - St. Catherine's College, Oxford
2008 Guggenheim Fellow
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Nov. 2006)
Atlas Award of the UCLA Friends of Geography in recognition of his service to the Department and FOG (Nov. 2006)
Henry C. Cowles Award for Excellence in Publication for the book "Biogeography - Space, Time and Life " published by John Wiley and Sons (2004)
Astor Visiting Lecturer - Oxford
Visiting Fellow and Life Member of Clare Hall - Cambridge
University of Helsinki Medal
Henry C. Cowles Award for Excellence in Publication (1999)
UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award
McMaster Teaching Excellence Award

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

PERFECT DROUGHT - MacDonald, G.M., Hidalgo, H. and Rian, S. 2005. Southern California and the Perfect Drought. Published in "Colorado River Basin Climate". Special Publication of the California Department of Water Resources

MacDonald, G.M., Beilman, D.W., Kremenetski, K.V., Sheng, Y., Smith, L.C. and Velichko, A.A. 2006. Rapid early development of the circumarctic peatlands and atmospheric CH4 and CO2 variations. Science, 314: 385-388.

MacDonald, G.M. and Case, R.A. 2005. Variations in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation over the past millennium. Geophysical Research Letters. 32: L08703, doi10.1029/2005GL022478.

Smith, L.C., Sheng, Y., MacDonald, G.M. and Hinzman, L.D. 2005. Disappearing arctic lakes. Science 308: 1429. (Discover Magazine Top 100 Science Stories of 2005)

Smith, L.C., MacDonald, G.M., Velichko, A.A., Beilman, D.W., Borisova, O.K., Frey, K.A., Kremenetski, K.V., and Sheng, Y. 2004. Siberian peatlands a net carbon sink and global methane sourse since the early Holocene. Science 303: 353-356.

Case, R.A. and MacDonald, G.M. 2003. Tree ring reconstructions of streamflow for three Canadian Prairie rivers. Journal of the American Water Resources Association 39: 703-716.

MacDonald, G.M. 2002 Biogeography: Space, Time and Life. John Wiley and Sons, New York. 518 p. (Cowles Award Winner)

MacDonald, G.M., Velichko, A.A., Kremenetski, C.V., Borisova, O.K., Goleva, A.A., Andreev, A.A., Cwynar, L.C., Riding, R.T., Forman, S.L., Edwards, T.W.D., Aravena, R., Hammarlund, D., Szeicz, J.M., Gattaulin, V.N. 2000. Holocene treeline history and climate change across northern Eurasia, Quaternary Research 53: 302-311.