Peter Wilf
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Ecology & Evolution
Leaves are the most abundant remains of ancient plants, and museums hold millions of leaf fossils with more collected every year. Their scientific value is limited by a stubborn problem: leaves from a single species vary widely in shape, so even painstaking examination of one fossil may fail to link it to the right plant family.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
paleobotany
fossil leaves
leaf architecture
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Build the Virtual Paleobotany Assistant, deep learning software trained on image databases of extant and fossil leaves, to assign individual leaf fossils to plant families and orders.
- Identify and date fossil plants from Southeast Asian source regions including Patagonia, Australia, India, Pakistan, South China, and Indochina, combining machine vision with traditional paleobotanical methods.
- Test how much Gondwanan, Indian Plate, and Eurasian lineages each contributed to the assembly of Malesian rainforest floras, using the influx of newly identified fossil leaf data.
More about the research
That bottleneck restricts what fossils can say about how plant communities, climates, and plant distributions changed through time.
Why it matters
Working out how Southeast Asia's rainforests were assembled could inform efforts to conserve them as the regional human population grows rapidly. A freely available identification tool for fossil leaves could let paleobotanists anywhere make discoveries well beyond this project, accelerating work on plant evolution, biogeography, and ancient climates.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Erin Manzitto-Tripp
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Ecology & Evolution
Digitize 3 million Asian vascular plant specimens from US herbaria, with a focus on Southeast Asian and Himalaya-Hengduan biodiversity hotspots.
Peter Siver
Connecticut College, CT·Ecology & Evolution
Document new species, physical traits and past environmental conditions for each silica-bearing freshwater protist group in an 82-million-year North American fossil collection, using scanning electron microscopy data.
Sarah Sheffield
Binghamton University, NY·Ecology & Evolution
Test how ancient climate events affected heterochrony, meaning shifts in developmental timing, in Paleozoic echinoderms, using phylogenetic trees built from museum, database and literature data.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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