Kelsey Arkle
Kelsey Arkle
Kelsey Arkle
Conservation Paleobiologist
Kelsey Arkle is a conservation paleobiologist. She studies subfossil and living mollusks (a group of invertebrates that includes snails, clams, oysters, and other animals) to understand how seagrass environments in the Caribbean have changed through time.
Kelsey received her B.A. in Geology from Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, and her Ph.D. in Geology with a focus on Conservation Paleobiology/Paleoecology from the University of Cincinnati. She briefly worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Cornell College, and she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Geology Department at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Augustana is a small liberal arts college located in a rural area.
Kelsey studies seagrass environments around St. Croix, a Caribbean island that is part of the United States Virgin Islands. To do this, she investigates subfossil mollusk remains, or the shells of mollusks that have died and been deposited relatively recently (geologically speaking), and thus have not yet fully fossilized. She also studies living mollusks. By comparing the types, numbers, and distributions of species in subfossil and modern mollusk faunas, Kelsey reconstructs how the seagrass environments around St. Croix have changed over hundreds and thousands of years.
Kelsey also examines how humans impact the environment. In one of her current projects, she is looking at how human activities affect the types of metals that are found in sediments on land and in the sea around St. Croix. She plans to determine whether metals that accumulate in sediments due to human activities can be detected in the shells of marine (saltwater) mollusks that live near St. Croix.
As is true of many college faculty, Kelsey includes undergraduate student researchers in her projects. In 2016, she and Cornell College student John Lewis worked on dating subfossil shells of venus clams (Chione) from St. Croix (see this video).
Daring to Dig Interview
In this video, Kelsey discusses the gendered expectations placed on female faculty members by students, as well as the need for female faculty role models. This interview was recorded in 2015, when Kelsey was a faculty member at Cornell College and used the surname Feser.
Selected works by Kelsey Arkle (Feser)
Arkle, K.M., and A.I. Miller. 2018. Evidence for stratigraphy in molluscan death assemblages preserved in seagrass beds: St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Paleobiology 44: 155–170. Link
Feser, K.M., and A.I. Miller. 2014. Temporal dynamics of shallow seagrass-associated molluscan assemblages in St. Croix, USVI: Towards the calibration of taphonomic inertia: PALAIOS 29: 218–230. Link
Feser, K.M., A.I. Miller, and C.A. Ferguson. 2012. Sieve-size overprint on experimental results: A correction to Ferguson and Miller (2007): Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 358–360: 109–111. Link
Video & audio content
Cornell College: CSRI: Dating shells using amino acid racemization. Video, 9 June 2016, via Youtube. Link