Anticipation, Discovery and Serendipity in Quaternary Paleoecology: Personal Experiences from the Iberian Pyrenees

This essay is a personal insight based on my own experience in the Iberian Pyrenees, which addresses three situations common in paleoecological research, such as the verification of previously devised hypotheses (anticipation), the finding on unknown events in unstudied sites (discovery) and the fin...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor: Rull, Valentí
Tipo de documento: artigo
Estado:Versão publicada
Data de publicação:2023
País:España
Recursos:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositório:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/332537
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/332537
Access Level:Acceso aberto
Palavra-chave:Pyrenees
Paleoecology
Hypothesis testing
Discovery
Serendipity
Quaternary
Late Glacial
Holocene
Last millennia
Descrição
Resumo:This essay is a personal insight based on my own experience in the Iberian Pyrenees, which addresses three situations common in paleoecological research, such as the verification of previously devised hypotheses (anticipation), the finding on unknown events in unstudied sites (discovery) and the finding of unexpected outputs in already known areas (serendipity). The account is concentrated on the value of the coring sites by themselves as generators of paleoecological knowledge, rather than on the actual findings, which are presented and discussed in the corresponding data papers. The main aim is to show that there is still much room for new findings, even in areas that have been surveyed for a long time and are supposed to be well known, from a paleoecological perspective. Finally, some general lessons are derived and conceptualized.