Professor Peter Langdon BSc, MSc, PhD, FRGS

Head of Geography and Environmental Science, Professor of Quaternary Science

Pete Langdon is currently the Head of School of Geography and Environmental Science at Southampton. He studied for his PhD at Southampton from 1996-1999, and after a 6 year stint lecturing at the University of Exeter, returned to Southampton in 2006, and has been there since.

Pete has broad research interests around Quaternary research, but specialises in reconstructing past environmental change from lake and peat sediments. He has worked on sediment sequences from every continent bar Antarctica, and tackled major research projects working on reconstructing past climate change, lake pollution and health, human-climate inter-relationships, and advanced the understanding of ecosystem tipping points.

He has served as the Publications Secretary and then Honorary Secretary of the Quaternary Research Association from 2005-2014. He is currently a member of the NERC Peer review college, Associate Editor for Quaternary Research, and INQUA HABCOM commission Vice-President.

Qualifications

B.Sc.(Geography and Geology) Leeds 1994
M.Sc.(Climate Change) UEA 1996
Ph.D.(Reconstructing Holocene climate change in Scotland utilising peat stratigraphy and tephrochronology) Southampton 1999

Employment

2006-date University of Southampton
2000-2006 University of Exeter
1999-2000 University of Southampton (PDRA)

Links to external websites

The University cannot accept responsibility for external websites.

Research

Responsibilities

Publications

Teaching

Contact

Research interests

PhD supervision

Pete has supervised 11 PhD students to completion, and is currently involved in supervising the following students:

Laura Crossley: Palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of Poole Harbour water quality and the implications for estuary management
Roseanna Mayfield: Detecting tipping points in lake ecosystems
Yanjie Zhao: Long-term resilience of lakes in the lower Yangtze basin
Rungtip Wonglersak: Plastic and genetic responses of Odonata and Chironomids to temperature

Research projects

Pete is actively working on a number of research projects with a range of collaborators.

Key projects include:

Holocene environmental change in the South Pacific (with David Sear and others)

We have been collecting lake and swamp sediment cores from across multiple islands in the South Pacific to build up a coherent picture of centennial to millennial scale climate change in this region. These datasets will allow us to test for long-term changes in El Nino and other Pacific related climate phenomena and how they interact with changes in major pressure systems across the biggest ocean on the planet. The work also allows us to assess the timing of colonisation on these islands, where climate was a major driver of this, and the impact of colonisation on the island ecosystems.

This work has been funded through support from NERC, National Geographic, the QRA, University of Southampton, and in collaboration with many in country colleagues.

Research group

Landscape Dynamics and Ecology (LDE)

Affiliate research group

Environmental Change and Sustainability (ECaS)

Research project(s)

Plant-Microbe interactions in a changing climate

Head of Geography and Environment

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Articles

Book

Blockley, S. P. E., Lane, C. S., Oh, A., Ditchfield, P., Bogaard, A., Langdon, P. G., Schreve, D. C., Thomas, D. S. G., & Bailey, R. M. (Eds.) (2009). The human dimesion in rapid environmental change. (Quaternary Abstracts; Vol. 1). Quaternary Research Association.

Book Chapters

Crossley, L. H., Langdon, P., Sear, D., Dearing, J. A., & Croudace, I. W. (2020). Palaeoenvironmental determination of biogeochemistry and ecological response in an estuarine marine protected area. In J. Humphreys, & R. W. E. Clark (Eds.), Marine Protected Areas: Science, Policy and Management (pp. 667-684). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102698-4.00034-4
Barber, K. E., & Langdon, P. (2001). Peat stratigraphy and climate change. In D. R. Brothwell, & A. M. Pollard (Eds.), Handbook of Archaeological Sciences (pp. 155-166). Wiley.

Conferences

Geog 1001 The Earth System (Convenor)
Geog 3011 Arolla Fieldcourse: Geographical Research in Alpine Environments

Professor Peter Langdon
University of Southampton
University Road
Southampton
SO17 1BJ

(023) 8059 4086

Room Number: 44/2006

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