Office Hours
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday
10:30–11:30 am
461 Duckering
Matthew Wooller
he/him/his
Professor
Chemical Oceanography
Marine Biology
Marine Ecology
College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences
Alaska Stable Isotope Facility
Room 481 Duckering Building
Fairbanks, AK 99775
907-474-6738
mjwooller@alaska.edu
PUBLICATIONS LIST HERE
- Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry
- Quaternary Paleoclimate and Paleoecology
- Elemental cycling (C N) and food web ecology
Dr. Wooller is an interdisciplinary scientist applying stable isotope techniques to understand the influence of changing environmental conditions on past and present ecosystems. By including a better understanding how modern environments function he hopes to appreciate how the past operated. A better understanding of biotic responses to global change will encourage rigorous testing of environmental models, allowing future environmental scenarios to be assessed. Dr. Wooller is jointly appointed with the Water and Environmental Research Center at ºÚÁϺÚÀúÊ· and is the Director of the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility and Director of the Alaska Quaternary Center. Isotopes (of C,N,O,H and Sr) feature as the primary analytical tools that Dr. Wooller uses to study a wide range of environmental and ecological questions. For example these include some of the current research areas: The reconstruction of past environmental conditions in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. Studying changes in the migration patterns and diets of animals (including sea lions, bowhead whales, eiders) in the Arctic.
- Paleoclimate, Paleoenvironment and Other Potential Drivers of Extinction of Mammuthus primigenius , St. Paul Island, Pribilof Islands, Alaska (National Science Foundation) This project will facilitate a better understanding of why woolly mammoths survived late into the mid-Holocene only in the environments of arctic islands of the BLB. Furthermore, this research is testing various hypotheses proposed to explain the extinction of the Holocene mammoth population on St. Paul Island, Pribilof Islands, Alaska, as well as establish the actual time of extinction.
- Exploring intrasite variability at Upward Sun River (Xaasaa Na’), a terminal Pleistocene site in central Alaska: foraging behaviors and paleoenvironmental contexts (National Science Foundation) This project consists of exploration of Upward Sun River (USR) (Xaasaa Na’), a deeply buried multicomponent site in central Alaska, associated with the earliest human remains and residential structure in the Arctic or Subarctic of North America (~11,500 cal BP). This exploration will focus on understanding technological organization and subsistence economy (fauna and floral use) in the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene, specifically how they are conditioned by site structure and organization, social organization, seasonality, and paleoenvironmental contexts.
- Identifying sources of organic matter to benthic organisms in the Beaufort and Chukchi outer continental shelves (CMI/BOEM). Benthic invertebrate communities in the Arctic are an essential ecosystem component in Arctic food webs, in terms of mineralization and energy transfer to higher trophic levels. Currently, the proportional contributions of different baseline sources of organic matter (marine, terrestrial or microbial carbon production) that sustain benthic organisms in the Arctic are unclear. This project will provide a better understanding of the organic matter sources consumed by benthic organisms, using a state-of-the-art fingerprinting approach for essential amino acids.
- Water and Environmental Research Center, ºÚÁϺÚÀúÊ·
- Alaska Stable Isotope Facility
- Institute of Marine Science, ºÚÁϺÚÀúÊ·
- Institute of Northern Engineering