In 1984 Whitlock returned to the United States to take up a tenure-track position at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History . She is a palaeoecologist who studies environmental change over centuries and millennia . She moved to the University of Oregon in 1990 , and was made Head of the Department of Geography in 1999 . She studies the relationship between fire , climate , humans and vegetation over a range of timescales . She is interested in how these relationships change over different timescales . Whitlock concentrates on the material that is found in lakes , extracting sediment cores that contain the fossils of pollen and particulate charcoal . Pollen grains can provide information about the plants that lived in the lake , meaning Whitlock can work out the vegetation and climate . By studying the charcoal in the sediments , Whitlock can track past fire . She has analysed the sediment cores in both wetlands and natural lakes . She uses the information she can extract from sediment cores to reconstruct historical vegetation , fire and climate . After the Yellowstone fires of 1988 , Whitlock developed tools to reconstruct previous fires using the charcoal particulates contained within lake sediments . She monitored the lakes that were close to the Yellowstone fires for ten years , studying the amount of charcoal in small lakes in burned and unburned waterbeds . She studied the origins and amount of charcoal in these lakes and established the way that charcoal had been transported from the lake to the sediment cores she extracted . She compared the charcoal abundance during the 1988 fires to historical fires at the Yellowstone National Park . The methods she developed are still being used by fire scientists in a Global Charcoal Database
Yellowstone fires of 1988
Yellowstone fires of 1988
Cathy Whitlock