Lisa Park Boush

Professor

My research focuses on questions related to the reconstruction of past climate history and its impact on coastal and large lake ecosystems. I have been working in the Bahamas for the past nineteen years, where my students and I have been reconstructing high resolution records of climatological and anthropogenically-driven environmental change for the past 6,000 years. In addition to my Bahamas work, in 2003, I initiated a database project to examine how clades of organisms invaded continental ecosystems via estuaries through geologic time which we have called the “estuary effect.” Finally, I am involved in the Lake Tanganyika Drilling Project where we hope to recover a 8 million year record of climate and biological change in Africa’s oldest and deepest lake.

Education

• Ph.D.: Geosciences at University of Arizona
• M.S.: Geosciences at University of Arizona
• B.A.: Geology at The College of Wooster

Courses

• ERTH 5000: Core Course—Professional Development
• ERTH 2050W: Communicating Earth and Environmental Science

Select Publications

• Antonietto, L.S., Park Boush, L.E., Plotnick, R.E., Stigall, A., 2020. Paleoecological aspects of western United States nonmarine ostracods during the Eocene-Oligocene transition: the early Oligocene faunas of the Renova Formation, southwestern Montana. Palaios 35(3): 165-174. https://doi.org/10.2110/palo.2019.040.
• Michelson, A.V. and Park Boush, L., 2017. A quantitative inference model for conductivity using non-marine ostracode assemblages on San Salvador Island, Bahamas: Paleosalinity records from two lakes. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology v. 477: 27-39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2017.04.002 0031-0182/
• Park, L.E., and Cohen, A.S., 2010. Paleoecological response of ostracods to early-Late Pleistocene lake level changes in Lake Malawi, East Africa. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, v. 303 (1-4): 71-80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2010.02.038
• Park, L.E. and Gierlowski-Kordesch, G.H., 2007. Paleozoic lake faunas: establishing aquatic life on land. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, v. 249 (1-2): 160-179. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2007.01.008