SEMINAR: At the Earth's Third Pole: Impacts on Primate Diversity in China Since the Pleistocene

The Seminar: To the Arctic and Antarctic Poles has recently been added the concept of a Third Ice Pole (item in a recent Nature): the Tibetan Plateau/Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and its adjacent plateaux in China (Yungui and Qinling). This is regarded as the largest centre in the world for speciation: radiation, dispersion, evolution and natural selection of plants, animals and humans. This region provides an ideal model for analysing humans’ impact on animals. It forms the earth's largest store of ice. It is melting faster than any other (82% of the glaciers have retreated and 10% of its permafrost has degraded). Such remarkable changes have significantly reflected global climate change, altered atmospheric circulation over half the planet, and impacted water supply for billions of people in Asia, particularly China. As a result, the plateaux now attract more attention from scholars and politicians in many fields. The seminar examines changes in primate diversity in China (especially of snub-nosed/golden monkeys and gibbons) during two periods: 1) from the beginning of Pleistocene (2 million years ago) to 400 years ago; and 2) from 400 years to now, particularly in the past more than 30 years of remarkable economical development. The seminar will also demonstrate an animated model showing the formation of Third Ice Pole due to the collision between Eurasia and India-Australia Plates. The Speaker: Having worked in Zoology and Primatology in China for more than 10 years Dr Pan came to UWA for his PhD project, which was sponsored by Overseas Postgraduate Scholarship granted by Australian Government. He received Australia Postdoctoral Research Fellow from the Australian Research Council in the year completing PhD Project. He worked at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa for three years. He is now adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the School of Anatomy and Human Biology. Most recently he (with Oxnard) has been invited and sponsored by China for continuing the projects on the Plateaux, which firstly includes human and animal biology, but may extend to other fields, including botany (with additional collaborators).