Donnelly, Jeffrey

The overarching goal of my research program is to understand how changes in climate have altered terrestrial and coastal systems in the recent geological past, to explore how landscape changes may have in turn impacted the climate system, and through this understanding improve our ability to project how coastal landforms and embayments will respond to future changes in these forcings. Primarily I use sedimentary and other natural archives to reconstruct past environmental conditions in order to develop a process oriented understanding of the causes and consequences of environmental change. For example, sea-level fluctuations, storms, and changing freshwater inputs play key roles in driving changes in many coastal systems, yet we know very little about how these environments respond to these multi-variant forcing mechanisms. Fortunately, all of these phenomena leave markers in the sedimentary record that we can sample and use to understand their impact through the late Holocene.