The Environmental Change Research Centre (ECRC) (www) was launched in 1991 and is an interdisciplinary research centre situated in the Geography Department of University College London which is one of only two UK Geography Departments to have been awarded the top research rating on all five occasions in the Higher Education Funding Council research assessments. The ECRC research is concerned primarily with reconstructing, monitoring and modelling environmental change with particular emphasis on quantitative palaeolimnology. Facilities include excellent laboratories with mass spectrome-ters, research microscopes, and coring equipment.

Viv Jones is a senior research fellow and her main research interest is environmental change in Arctic and Antarctic regions with an emphasis on the use of lake sediments to infer past climate and pollution histories. Her own research focuses on the technique of diatom analysis in particular the use of diatom silica to reconstruction Holocene temperatures in Europe.