Humans have been altering our planet throughout the Holocene, but the scale of impacts increased dramatically in the mid-20th century, representing the start of the proposed Anthropocene Epoch. Dr. Stegner will discuss the ways these pervasive anthropogenic impacts are comparable in magnitude, uniqueness, and geologic perseverance to the global changes that mark previous major geologic time intervals. To identify the geologic signals that characterize the Anthropocene, she has studied sediment cores from Searsville Reservoir, a ~130 year old reservoir located at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in the eastern foothills of the San Francisco Peninsula, California. One of these cores is being considered as the "golden spike" for the Anthropocene. 

Dr. Stegner is conservation paleobiologist with the Hadley Lab at Stanford. She studies ecological and environmental change over the last 10,000+ years.  Her research synthesizes modern, historic, and paleoecologic records to study how species diversity and abundance have changed through time–on local and regional scales–in response to past environmental changes. Her field work includes excavation of packrat middens, small mammal mark-recapture surveys, and collection of lake cores to reconstruct past biodiversity and the environment. Dr. Stegner received a B.S. in biology from Stanford University in 2010, followed by a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, then continued on to a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with the Abrupt Change in Ecological Systems group.