Rebecca Hamilton

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Lecturer at The University of Sydney

Tropical forests are the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems on earth, yet are particularly susceptible to future climatic and human-induced change. Identifying tipping points at which tropical ecosystems will reorganise is therefore an important research goal. Limited research within the seasonally dry tropical forests of south-east Asia means...

It has been suggested that Iberian arrival in the Americas in 1492 and subsequent dramatic depopulation led to forest regrowth that had global impacts on atmospheric CO2 concentrations and surface temperatures. Despite tropical forests representing the most important terrestrial carbon stock globally, systematic examination of historical afforestat...

The environmental crises currently gripping the Earth have been codified in a new proposed geological epoch: the Anthropocene. This epoch, according to the Anthropocene Working Group, began in the mid-20th century and reflects the “great acceleration” that began with industrialization in Europe [J. Zalasiewicz et al., Anthropocene 19, 55–60 (2017)]...

The dominant paradigm is that large tracts of Southeast Asia’s lowland rainforests were replaced with a “savanna corridor” during the cooler, more seasonal climates of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) (23,000 to 19,000 y ago). This interpretation has implications for understanding the resilience of Asia’s tropical forests to projected climate change,...

It has been argued that we have now entered the Anthropocene, a proposed epoch in which humans are having a dominant impact on the Earth system. While some geologists have sought to formalize the Anthropocene as beginning in the mid-twentieth century, its social, geophysical, and environmental roots undoubtedly lie deeper in the past. In this revie...

It has been argued that we have now entered the Anthropocene, a proposed epoch in which humans are having a dominant impact on the Earth system. While some geologists have sought to formalize the Anthropocene as beginning in the mid-twentieth century, its social, geophysical, and environmental roots undoubtedly lie deeper in the past. In this revie...

Burgeoning global trade and colonial policies promoted transformations in land use and agriculture throughout tropical regions in the 19th and 20th centuries, but the local and regional ecological consequences of landscape changes are still being identified and analysed. The Philippine Archipelago, which experienced successive colonial regimes acro...

Studying past ecosystems from ancient environmental DNA preserved in lake sediments ( sed aDNA) is a rapidly expanding field. This research has mainly involved Holocene sediments from lakes in cool climates, with little known about the suitability of sed aDNA to reconstruct substantially older ecosystems in the warm tropics. Here, we report the suc...

The Mekong and Ganges-Brahmaputra river basins are an important life force for millions of people across South and Southeast Asia. Yet growing levels of pollution from diverse sources are transforming these important waterscapes into reservoirs of toxicity. Holistic studies of pollution in these systems remains a critical gap. This largely stems fr...

Background The global human footprint has fundamentally altered wildfire regimes, creating serious consequences for human health, biodiversity, and climate. However, it remains difficult to project how long-term interactions among land use, management, and climate change will affect fire behavior, representing a key knowledge gap for sustainable ma...

With more people now living in urban areas than outside of them, urbanism is becoming an increasingly important socioeconomic and ecological arena for our species in the twenty-first century. Understanding historical and regional variation in urban trajectories and land use has the potential to provide long-term perspectives on pressing contemporar...

The Botany Wetlands are the contemporary remnant of a formerly extensive coastal freshwater wetland in the inner-urban suburbs of Sydney (Australia). This site supports a range of ecosystem services, including human physical and mental health benefits, filtration of stormwater runoff from a highly urban and industrial catchment, and accommodation s...

The effects of climate change on long-term mercury (Hg) cycling are still not well understood, as climate changes are usually gradual and can only be assessed using high-resolution archives. Our study site (a small, lowland tectonic lake in Sulawesi, Indonesia) provides a unique opportunity to further understanding of Hg cycling in the Southeast As...

In comparison to temperate and arid regions, environmental responses to the Last Glacial Maximum and the Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene boundary remain poorly known for many parts of the tropics, making it challenging to unravel human–landscape interactions across this timeframe. This is particularly the case in insular Near Oceania, where sea‐l...

Meat consumption and production in Asia have boomed over the last decade to meet growing regional and global demand. Asia now supplies around 40% of the global broiler or meat chicken industry. Dominant policy frameworks such as ‘One Health’ aim to manage the health risks associated with factory livestock farming, which has rightly become a major c...

Human activity has fundamentally altered wildfire on Earth, creating serious consequences for human health, global biodiversity, and climate change. However, it remains difficult to predict fire interactions with land use, management, and climate change, representing a serious knowledge gap and vulnerability. We used expert assessment to combine op...

Projecting and managing the feedback between tropical deforestation and global Earth system dynamics, and identifying potential critical thresholds or tipping points, will be key to our species’ future on this planet. By understanding the major historical processes that underpin the origins of this interaction, and bringing natural and social syste...

Archaeologists frequently invoke climate change as a driving cause for ancient expansions of human populations, but geomorphic changes can also play an important role in opening or closing routes of migration. In China, archaeological evidence demonstrates that valleys in the Jialing River's watershed were important routes for the movement of Neoli...

Shell mounds are an important component of the archaeology of coastal regions in northern Vietnam. Understanding cultural dynamics and settlement patterns within seemingly homogenous layers of shell accumulation is difficult based on field survey and excavation records alone. Here, we use microstratigraphic and microfacies analysis to decipher the...

Land use modelling is increasingly used by archaeologists and palaeoecologists seeking to quantify and compare the changing influence of humans on the environment. In Southeast Asia, the intensification of rice agriculture and the arrival of European colonizers have both been seen as major catalysts for deforestation, soil erosion, and biodiversity...

Oceania is a key region for studying human dispersals, adaptations and interactions with other hominin populations. Although archaeological evidence now reveals occupation of the region by approximately 65–45 000 years ago, its human fossil record, which has the best potential to provide direct insights into ecological adaptations and population re...

Climate variability and hominin evolution are inextricably linked. Yet, hypotheses examining the impact of large-scale climate shifts on hominin landscape ecology are often constrained by proxy data coming from off-site lake and ocean cores and temporal offsets between paleoenvironmental and archaeological records. Additionally, landscape response...

Several studies have shown that ancient plant-derived DNA can be extracted and sequenced from lake sediments and complement the analysis of fossil pollen in reconstructing past vegetation responses to climate variability and anthropogenic perturbations. The majority of such studies have been performed on Holocene lakes located in cooler higher lati...

Any palynologist who has worked in the tropics has undoubtedly dealt with the frustration of trying to classify small, tricolporate pollen into meaningful taxonomic groups. While this is not a significant issue where coarse-scale identifications represent similar habitat indicators or "unknown" types are rare, it poses a problem when one of these "...

The tropical forests of Sulawesi represent some of the most diverse, biogeographically significant ecosystems globally. However, long-term ecological data for the region are scarce, making it difficult to predict vegetation response to future climatic and anthropogenic drivers of change. This is problematic as gauging the acclimation thresholds of...

Sites are often prioritised for conservation based on the premise that they represent remnants bygone landscapes of natural and/or culture significance. These approaches are, however, often constructed in the absence of any long-term socio-ecological data, making it challenging to draw parallels between the site being conserved, and the past landsc...

During the Angkor period (9th to 15th centuries C.E.) the Khmer kingdom extended across much of mainland Southeast Asia. The primate city of Angkor was located on the floodplains to the north of the Tonle Sap and connected to a network of secondary cities across the kingdom via formal road or navigable river systems. Preah Khan of Kompong Svay was...

The Dipterocarpaceae family is ubiquitous across mainland and maritime south-east Asia. Species within the family are often so well-adapted to – and prolific within – ecologically distinct forest types, that they are used as habitat indicators within forestry and ecological research. The limited work on the classification of Dipterocarpaceae pollen...

The sedimentology, geochemistry, and plant microfossils of volcanic lake sediments from Cambodia were analysed to reconstruct a 4700 year record of change in moisture availability. This site sits at the heart of the intersection zone of the East Asian and Indian summer monsoons – a climatic system that is socio-ecologically important but poorly und...

Throughout the Angkor period (9th to 15th centuries CE), the Khmer kingdom maintained a series of interconnected cities and smaller settlements across its territory on mainland Southeast Asia. One such city was Koh Ker, which for a brief period in the 10th century CE even served as a royal capital. The complexity of the political landscape meant th...

Reconstructing the environmental history of protected areas permits an empirically-based assessment of the conservation values ascribed to these sites. Ideally, this long-term view can contribute to evidence-based management policy that is both ecologically ‘realistic’ and pragmatically feasible. Lachlan Nature Reserve, a protected wetland in Cente...

The 1.073 million km2 Murray-Darling River Basin (MDB) drains 14% of Australia’s landmass, incorporates Australia’s most economically important agricultural region, and presents one of Australia’s most important and contentious water security challenges. In this study we report the discovery of a hitherto unrecognised terminal palaeolake system ’La...

Middle to Late Holocene age, horizontally laminated clays and muds of lacustrine origin predominate the uppermost layers of the valley-fill sequence deposited in the lower Murray River’s bedrock gorge upstream of the set of lakes which separate Australia's largest river system, The Murray-Darling, from its discharge point to the Southern Ocean. The...

Ecosystem services include the goods and services derived from the natural environment that benefit humans and contribute to the public good. Relative to services from other forms of capital, ecosystem services are often unaccounted for or undervalued due to their non-market and indirect nature and, therefore, have commonly been highly depleted. Th...